


Casehistory

by TheSoulOfAStrawberry



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Armin is too caring, Because wow imagine a German-centric SNK fanwork, Berlin Wall, Child Abuse, Control Issues, Dysfunctional Relationships, Gymnasium!AU, Lots about Berlin and German politics, Mental Health Issues, Mute!Eren, Other, selective mutism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-02-18 06:03:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 53,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2337854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSoulOfAStrawberry/pseuds/TheSoulOfAStrawberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Armin never thought anything interesting would happen in his life. He felt he lived in a liminal state: never without acquaintances but never with good friends; never consumed by any emotion in particular except perhaps boredom; he didn’t dream but he had his future planned out until the age of 21; and above all, nothing interesting ever happened to him. Every week in the life of Armin Arlert had been almost the same for as far back as he could remember, his weekends fading into a mist of markets, homework and rented DVDs, interspersed with house parties attended by the same group of people, where nothing happened and nobody remembered. </p><p>At least, that was the case up until the point where Mikasa leaned forward and whispered that proposal that would turn his life on its head."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Exposition

**Author's Note:**

> There was a post going round Tumblr (in German) about good German-centric AUs, and I couldn't help but nick some. That said, I'm from the UK, so there might be some errors! I chose Gymnasium because I don't know the workings of the others too well, plus, I can't really imagine Armin anywhere else.
> 
> EXTREME WARNINGS for most things related to mental health issues, abuse (of all kinds) and suicide. For the full trigger list, please see here (contains spoilers): http://evacchi.tumblr.com/post/103904024196/a-little-note-for-people-reading-casehistory-under

No one had ever bothered to tell Armin that Eren Jaeger was trouble. 

It was partially his own fault, he supposed, for falling in with him and Mikasa. 

Somewhere between overhearing his mum telling the neighbours back when they first moved to Berlin that his Gymnasium was “the good one, even if it’s in the rough part, y’know” and having his head so far into a stack of books that he forgot to really make friends with anyone, Armin became convinced that his life would be pretty normal, and that the people in it were pretty normal too, if not often entirely inconsequential.

Even once Eren had succeeded in turning his entire life upside-down, there would still be a lot of people who couldn’t see Eren as Armin did: as the whirlwind of anger, bad puns and fast food. This was because Armin noticed too much. Or, rather, he couldn’t help but notice Eren and only Eren.

Eren and Mikasa joined Armin’s class part way through the term, far enough away from the Abitur for them to slip seamlessly in to the course of work, but close enough for other students to sink away from them in favour of revising economics or political science. Mikasa had hold of Eren’s hand as they stood in front of the French teacher on that fateful Tuesday morning, and Armin found himself mildly irritated that Jean was poking him, concerned as to whether that cute girl was with that weird-looking boy. 

No one would assume that Eren Jaeger was or ever would be trouble because for the first few months of his integration at the school, he didn't say anything to anyone. At first Armin thought it was merely because no-one talked to him. The way he held himself in his worn-out jeans said he wasn't interested, his messy hair said he wasn't bothered, and those piercing eyes of his- one green, one yellow, with tiny pupils that drew any glance out to a stare- said he was different. That was, until Marco asked him how he felt about the book that had been assigned for German as they were packing up to leave, and he just shook his head.

“No… You’ve not read it?” Marco looked confused, and Armin saw Eren blush as he shook his head again.

“So you have…? I… Ah, I’m sorry I asked, nevermi-”

“Oi, Eren,” came a voice, and Eren’s head whipped round so fast that the way the tufts of hair at his crown pointed changed, “What’s your problem? Marco’s just trying to be nice, jeez.” Jean had his rucksack over one shoulder, and was leant on Marco’s desk in a way that, in any other situation, would be the pose for asking Marco to go to the cinema at the weekend.

The moment in which Eren turned back around was the moment Armin knew he was about to watch something unfold. It really wasn’t anything to do with Jean: it merely became obvious that Eren’s reactions in social environments were different to anyone else’s. Something eventually would have antagonised what came next, as judging by the way Mikasa advanced towards them from the corner by the window, this sort of thing had happened before.

“What the hell man, don’t ignore me. You’re kind of rude-”

It was almost a textbook fight, if it weren’t for the fact that Eren was the least textbook boy in existence. Jean put his hand on Eren’s shoulder, and the moment it made contact, the shorter boy went rigid and slapped his hand away. There was a ruckus as Jean tripped on his own feet and his thigh made contact with the table behind him: an action which only served to further knock his balance and create a painful metallic clatter as his displaced the chair into the opposite table leg.

That was it. Jean lunged at Eren, sending him sprawling over his own chair and landing at Armin’s feet. He squirmed violently as the room erupted into chaos- Jean shouting at Eren, Marco tugging at Jean’s shoulder, Armin and Mikasa trying to pull the pair apart while people who had been in the process of leaving for the weekend came to see who had started fighting. All the while, Eren had said nothing. 

It was a strange place to have an epiphany, a shouting match cum teenage brawl, but seeing how suddenly violent Eren became when in close proximity of a person made something click in his brain. He understood on a basic level that Eren had social anxiety, but the events of the following split second reminded him that he’d only ever have a basic understanding of how Eren’s mind worked.

“GET THE FUCK OFF OF ME HORSEFACE!” 

And that was the first time Armin heard Eren speak, a moment in which his actions matched up directly with the fire in his scowl. It was also the first time he’d ever seen Jean get punched so squarely in the face. It did the trick, as Jean yet out a startlingly high-pitched yelp, and Eren saw his opportunity to bolt out the classroom door, stumbling slightly as he went. Mikasa, as Armin would come to learn was always the case, was hot on his heels.

Armin didn’t have to get involved. He knew that. But Eren had left his bag, and Armin’s heart was pounding with adrenaline from having Jean push him away during the kerfuffle.

Jean could have told him that Eren Jaeger was trouble, and seen as Armin kind of liked Jean, he might have taken his advice and stayed back. However, this was not to be. Perhaps it was just that Armin’s fate was tied to Eren’s, but maybe Jean was just a bit of a blockhead when it came to cause and effect. Either way, Jean’s reaction when Armin picked up Eren’s rucksack as well as his own was not the right one, holistically-speaking.

“Armin, what the fuck?”

“I know you don’t mean it Jean,” his hair flicked as he turned around, “But sometimes you can be a real douchebag.” 

Armin was too preoccupied to appreciate the satisfaction of leaving a room on a line like that; particularly to a boy he was often told was considered to be one of the popular boys (which never made sense, seen as Jean only really hung out with Marco and Armin). If it weren’t for the fact it was a Friday and half the students had already disappeared to catch the buses going out of town, Armin might have been a temporary legend the following morning. 

Armin found Eren and Mikasa sat under the stairwell a few corridors down from their classroom. 

“Um… Hi, sorry. I… Eren, you forgot your bag.”

There were a number of reactions Armin had been expecting from the newbie with social anxiety in this situation, but a smile was not one of them. He was taken aback, particularly as beside him, Mikasa seemed to have doubled in her wariness of Armin since leaving the classroom.

One thing Armin did notice was that Eren’s left hand had hold of his right wrist. Or, rather, he didn’t remark this until he let go to take his bag from Armin, who was still a little frazzled from being smiled at by this strange yet ever more intricate individual, and there was blood on his finger. Fresh, crimson blood.

“Eren, are you OK?” Armin wouldn’t admit he panicked, but some sense of culpability kicked in along with his hyper-logical thought processes and he found himself dropping to his knees. However, he realised he might have made a mistake as Eren shrank back, tensing.

“I’m sorry- ah, should I go?” 

Eren held his eye contact for a few seconds, before, surprisingly, shaking his head.

“So you’re OK with this kid seeing this?” Mikasa gestured to his wrist. With her softly-spoken yet sharp tone of speech, this almost sounded like a threat, but something about the way she looked at him and how he trusted her told Armin otherwise.

“It’s Armin, by the way,” he said, quieter this time. He could feel himself calming down as the noise of the students down the corridor lessened.

Tentatively, Eren removed his hand from his wrist and peeled the bloodied sleeve of his jumper back. To begin with, Armin was confused as to how a simple grapple could draw blood. It was then that he made out, underneath the already dried blood, the straight cuts running in a neat little row, and his heart dropped.

Between them, Eren and Jean had managed to reopen wounds that Eren had inflicted upon himself.

It was only then that the full weight of what Armin didn’t understand became apparent to him. 

Eren hadn’t said anything, but he had given him those most warming smile even at a time when he was feeling vulnerable and pumping with anger; and, in doing so, had made Armin feel more accepted and valued than he’d felt in a long time. How could someone who held someone like him in such high esteem hate themselves so much as to do this to themselves?

The worst part was the fleeting glance Eren shot Armin that was dripping in guilt. Eren had no reason to feel guilty. It pained Armin to think he did, on top of valuing himself so little. A more assertive Armin would have told Eren exactly how much he meant to him: only a tiny fraction of which Armin was aware of. Real Armin, however, simply lowered his gaze and tried to banish the lump in his throat that forewarned the embarrassing baby tears for which Armin was infamous.

In hindsight, he probably could have backed out then. He often considered how Eren might have reacted to that, having put enough faith in Armin to let him stay, and he hated to think about it: about a world in which to Eren, he was a mere stranger. That said, Mikasa had told Armin that what he did for Eren may have been natural kindness for him, but for Eren, it was something much, much more.


	2. Abstract

“Eren,” Mikasa’s hair fell in front of her eyes, “We need to get that seen to. Armin, is there a nurse’s room or something here?”

Mikasa was looking at Armin expectantly. He was expected to say something, but if he was honest, he wasn’t sure the little room next to the office that he’d used back in his second year was something Eren would like- if it was even open at this time of day. He looked at his watch. Twenty minutes, already, since the school day had ended.

“Um…” Armin couldn’t quite tear his eyes away from Eren’s wrist, but forced himself too in order to open his rucksack. “I… Ahem,” he cleared his throat and lowered the tone of his voice, masking his upset the best he could, “I… Er, Eren, you don’t like that sort of stuff, I mean… People. Um. It’s just…” He found what he was looking for, buried deep in the inside pocket of his bag. Thankfully, he’d not had to use it for a few years. “I have this, if it’s easier.”

Eren and Mikasa both looked somewhat surprised to see him holding up a first aid kit. With his free hand, Eren lunged for his own bag, taking out one of his notepads. Armin flinched as he ripped out the back page, and it became obvious what was happening once Mikasa shoved a pen in front of Eren’s nose, which he took without thanks.

Armin could read upside-down as he wrote. _Why have you got one of those???_

Eren held the paper up, and Armin took a moment to appreciate how well his scribbly handwriting seemed to represent this messy-haired contradiction sat in front of him.

“Um,” Armin began, blushing a little more, “It don’t really need it anymore, it’s just… I don’t know, when I was younger I got pushed around for being… Well, me.”

Eren was writing again. _Give me their names and they won’t bother you again_ he held up, a shy but cheeky grin spreading across his lips.

“Ah… No, I think they had to re-sit the year too many times and dropped out. Or at least, one of them did. Um… Anyway, Mikasa will be angry if I let you get into any more fights,” he giggled nervously under the gaze of the girl in question. Eren was holding his gaze now, which was strange. He’d been avoiding it before.

Eren definitely had heterochromia, and Armin couldn’t help but find this beautiful.

“Uh… I-I guess you probably want Mikasa to do this?” 

Eren shook his head, not as sure as before. There was a moment in which Mikasa’s eyes flashed dangerously, before she seemed to acquiesce, moving out of the way so Armin could shuffle next to Eren, not daring to look up from breaking open the clasp of the first aid box as he realised he could smell Eren’s deodorant. 

On Monday morning, Jean would still be upset with him for having called him a douchebag, and Armin would apologise, before explaining that he still meant it because “Jean, you idiot, Eren’s got selective mutism and you yelled at him about it.”. Jean would wear that guilty expression of his that Armin had once found somewhat endearing, before muttering some English swear words to himself and asking Armin what he should do to make it up. At no point, would Armin mention how close he had been to Eren Jaeger: how he had felt him tense up as Armin took his wrist before slowly, slowly, slowly trusting him and loosening into Armin’s gentle grip; how he could feel Eren’s breath on his fringe as he dabbed at the cuts with non-alcoholic wipes; and how he felt tested, somehow, through his endurance in not crying as Eren scribbled an apology with his spare hand and Mikasa watched on like a hawk.

Armin had been in love before. It had mostly been with boys, but then it wasn’t as if gender really mattered- not once he realised that being in love with boys made things a lot easier, as he could do many more things with them before having to be straight up with them and other people about what their relationship really consisted of. People asked questions when he hung round Sasha’s one Sunday to play video games, but no one seemed to bat an eyelid when he woke up in Jean’s bed with a hangover (though then, someone had spiked his drink the night before, so it was somewhat excusable, even if he did enjoy Jean’s peaceful sleeping face for upwards of half an hour.). He liked to think he had himself pretty sussed out when it came to being in love, and there was no ambiguity now as to how Eren was making him feel. 

That said, he’d never been this uncomfortable with being in love before. 

He wrapped the bandage round three times, loose enough to fit two fingers under, but tight enough that it didn’t move about. He wondered about asking Eren not to hurt himself again, but it was arrogant of him to assume his opinion meant anything to this boy. Besides, he’d already been accommodating enough to put himself into an uncomfortable situation in order to make Armin feel useful and validated. 

“Done,” he said, looking up, and Eren was writing something again. 

_Do you want to go for something to eat?_

“Oh! I…” Armin dared look at Mikasa, but, for once, she didn’t seem to be paying attention. Perhaps she was tired.

Eren was still waiting for his answer. On the one hand, maybe he should give Eren his space, so he could talk to Mikasa freely- well, he assumed he could talk to her. Then again, it was Eren who was offering, with his apologetic grin and crumpled piece of paper.

“Do you guys… um… not need to get back?”

“We walk, like you,” Mikasa deadpanned.

“W-Wait, how do you know that I-”

“We go the same way. It’s an apartment on the corner, 3rd floor, right?”

Armin had always though Jean was a good judge of character, even if he himself was a little rough round the edges, but perhaps Mikasa had been an exception. “About the food, I think…” he began, but was given no opportunity to finish, as Eren caught hold of the sleeve of his jacket between his forefinger and thumb, stopping Armin from heading back up the corridor.

“Eren…?”

It was only then, as he’d placed his judgements on the pair, that they both subverted them. Eren looked somewhat hurt that Armin was going to leave, despite the fact that so far, Armin had been thinking that he was making Eren uncomfortable. That, and in the same moment, Mikasa held up her wallet.

“I’ll pay.”

Eren pointed at Armin, as if to say _ha!_ , while Armin’s cheeks tinged themselves pink, partially with embarrassment that Mikasa thought he couldn’t afford it (well… he couldn’t, not really) and partially because they were both being so nice to him, even though he’d not done or said anything special.

When his mum returned from work later, around eight, he wouldn’t tell her where he’d been. Not because she would mind, but because he wasn't sure she’d believe that her son, whose skin was slightly too pale to be healthy thanks to his tendency to have no reason to go outside other than for errands and school, would end up eating a Subway sandwich on the embankment, watching the lights of Berlin illuminate one by one as dusk fell.

Mikasa had indeed paid. Armin had stood by awkwardly, watching his fingers on the glass of the cabinet as his face burned with humiliation for having left his wallet at home. He now owed Mikasa in more ways than one.

“How do you know what Eren wants?” Armin had asked, and Mikasa just flicked her fringe at him.

“He always has the same thing. And picks out the cucumber.” 

Eren did pick out the cucumber. There had been a whole five slices, which seemed a bit unfortunate as each one he picked out made his sandwich fall apart even more, oozing chilli sauce on his skinny fingers. He licked his thumb as he flung a cucumber frisbee at a plump looking pigeon, which pecked at it experimentally, before deciding it didn't suite its tastes and bobbing off towards the next bench: where a loud English couple sat sharing a Currywurst.

For the most part, they sat in silence. Armin wasn’t sure what to say. He wasn’t sure if the silence was heavy, or if it was natural to Eren and Mikasa. Either way, he envisaged a number of different conversations, all of which took different turns. It was part of the way he was that he would imagine Eren running off to chase the birds and irritate pensioners with his wild movements and scuffed trainers. Mikasa and Armin would watch, and Armin would ask Mikasa how she felt, and, without looking away from Eren taking a picture of the clouds on his phone, she would reply that she was sad, but content. In his head, her smile said exactly the same thing as she said, even though the Mikasa in the real world looked as if she were lost- not in thought, just in the empty corridors of her own musing.

He liked to think back to that first meeting a lot. At that point, Eren seemed easy to understand, and Mikasa seemed rational. Not to mention, he could leave so many questions unasked- where were they from, what was their family like, were they related, what made Eren hate himself so badly and what made Mikasa seem as if she were retreating into her own melancholy stare when she thought people weren’t looking- without it tearing him apart at night.

By the time Eren had finished with his sandwich, the streetlights had come on, and Armin was regretting not having worn a jacket.


	3. Table of Contents

Armin hadn’t passed his weekend in exactly the same way as usual. Recently, he’d been feeling that he’d gotten to the point where nothing in his life was particularly enjoyable, but many things seem to waste his time for long enough for him not to end up staring at his bedroom wall, being crushed under the weight of his own existential angst. At weekends, he mostly slept- 15 hours a day- caught up on homework he’d found no interest in doing during the week, and, on Saturday afternoons, went to the market to see how much fresh produce he could buy with eight euros, to last him and his mother through the week.

The appearance of this puzzle, this fixation, this boy with stunning eyes, however, changed the normal set-up of Armin’s weekend. While he still slept the same amount, he felt less reluctant to give up his bed-covers and care about the world when he could try and get his somewhat obsessively logical mind around the things that made up that dark-skinned boy that now occupied his dreams. 

His laptop progressively warmed his lap as he tapped keywords into the search bar, one after the other in an attempt to widen his knowledge: anxiety, social anxiety, mutism, selective mutism, mutism causes, mutism and depression, depression. He knew what came next, but his cowardly fingers couldn’t let him face up to it, as he tried to ignore the mental image of the tiny slices running up Eren’s arm; like marks to remember something written in permanent marker, or graffiti scratched onto a flower-adorned gravestone. 

He came out understanding a number of things, and none had to do with the nature of Eren’s inability to speak. Whatever the cause (if any), whatever the seriousness, whatever treatment (if any) he was undertaking, was nothing to do with Armin unless Eren, at some point in the future, decided that this was something that he felt Armin should know. The literature was far too confusing and contradictory for Armin to come up with his own judgements anyway, particularly as he’d only just met Eren.

He had decided that he personally found no fault in Eren not being able to speak. It was the way he coped, and who was Armin to judge. It was stupid to think, and he’d never say it out loud, but there were days when he thought the whole world would do well to fall silent, even if just for an hour or two. 

Knowing that Eren had a plenty loud enough voice when he was in danger was comforting though.

Armin took a walk. It wasn’t something he was in the habit in, being a small boy in what most bar his mother would consider to be a rough part of town, but he wore a hat and gender-neutral clothing in the hope that he wouldn’t be mistaken for a girl or an effeminate boy. Hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his coat, he took a backstreet to avoid the bar on the main road along from his house, following it out of town. 

His thinking was that wherever Eren and Mikasa lived, it couldn’t be more than a quarter of an hour from where Armin lived, and could only be in virtually one direction, judging by the route they would have taken (if it weren’t for the detour in the name of a sandwich) from the school. He wasn’t sure what he’d achieve, other than perhaps being equal with them in regards to the amount he knew about them. In an ideal world, Eren would be sat on his doorstep, doing his homework, and his face would light up into a lopsided grin as Armin called out his name. 

Armin stopped, shoes scuffing against the pavement underfoot. This was ridiculous.

Perhaps it was the effect of the walk, but Armin felt more refreshed than usual from his weekend. He got up early and had breakfast, leaving a cup of tea on his mother’s bedside table before stepping out the door, organised, upbeat and looking cute in his favourite jumper.

Jean didn’t notice. Like hell did he notice. He went off on one until Armin shut him up about Eren, at which point he began muttering about apologising. He had an annoying habit of running his hands through his hair whenever he was stressed, and not even in a normal way: it looked as if he were trying to feel every minute complexity in the surface of his scalp.

Thankfully though, he didn’t have to put up with it much longer. His heart had already done a backflip before his mind had computed who had finally walked through the door of classroom Y4. 

Eren had a headphone dangling from one ear, a chemistry textbook in his hand and a pen behind his other ear. He looked the picture of studious, if not for the fact that the shadows under his eyes suggested sleep deprivation and the expression on his face showed no interest in studying- rather, much to Armin’s secret delight, it had considerably brightened upon seeing him.

“Ah,” Jean said, finally stopping the hair thing, but irritating Armin more by twisting his face- which some say was quite good-looking- into a sour expression, as if he were sucking on the lemon of his own crushing regret. “He’s coming this way, with the chick…”

Indeed, Eren had tight hold of Mikasa’s hand, and was dragging her behind him.

“Her name is Mikasa,” Armin muttered, and instantly regretted it, as Jean perked up. 

“How do you know that?” Jean just had time to hiss softly, blinking twice in a sort of astonishment that Armin of all people might have been invested enough in this mysterious new girl with her stoic depression and midnight hair to do something as daringly banal as to discover her name. Thankfully for Armin’s faith in Jean’s humanity, Jean managed to work out who Armin was really invested in by the end of the morning: though it was possible he got it in the following thirty seconds.

“Uh… Hey Eren. I think Mikasa wants her hand back no-”

One day, Armin would learn that for him to get whole sentences out around Eren was somewhat of a feat. Indeed, on this occasion he could have ended his sentence, but was simply so taken aback by this enigmatic boy reaching to tuck his hair behind his ear before whispering, “Cute outfit.” Particularly as he’d preceded the action by quite visibly mentally-preparing himself for the interaction, manifesting as a slight scowl. Indeed, his voice sounded faint, as if long unused- perhaps Eren couldn’t speak to Mikasa? 

It both worried and amused Jean to see the pair react after that. Armin went bright red, looking down at his feet as he fiddled with his sleeve, partly because Eren had noticed he’d made an effort, but mostly because it had been so important to Eren to tell Armin this that he’d put himself outside of his comfort zone. 

Except Eren now seemed to be closing in on himself, smile gone, avoiding everyone’s gaze. 

“Um… T-Thank you,” Armin said, as although he felt small in front of Jean, he felt Eren needed to know how much he appreciated it. Thankfully, Mikasa seemed on hand to help- Armin hoped she knew what he was trying to do, selfish reasons of getting Eren’s divine attention aside.

“Hey, Eren,” she said, he voice sounding as if it had been carried in on a breeze. She could narrate Armin’s dreams; her voice was so velvety, “Look at Armin.” It wasn’t a command, it wasn’t a pointer, rather a casual suggestion. And Eren did. Not into his eyes, just at his lips, which Armin couldn’t help but having fixed in a small, embarrassed smile. He could feel Jean’s stare on the back of his neck, but he didn’t care, because Eren was blushing, and it was such a strange yet beautiful thing that Armin had to help from pinching himself.

Except it didn’t last long, as somewhere along the lines, the situation became too much for Eren, who span on his heel and exited the classroom, pursued by Mikasa. In retrospect, it occurred to Armin that a person like Eren might be hyper-sensitive to social situations, and may indeed, from the corner of his eye, have noticed that Marco had entered the fray. 

Just as Armin though the incident was over, Mikasa appeared again in the doorway. He wasn’t sure how he’d not managed to notice before, but even from a few metres away, Armin found himself struck with how her eyes were like ice: not in that they were blue, as they were a dull brown, but how they seemed to reflect light so brilliantly yet still seem so unfeeling.

“Start of break, meet me in classroom C3.”

And with that, she was gone.

The air around Armin seemed to have gone still. He had a hand pressed against his warmed cheeks, and had he have been in the right mood, he would have closed his eyes, savouring that blush, perhaps even pretending that that gentle touch was not his own. Alas, he was a student. Any ephemeral moments he was gifted in the world were more than likely to be taken away by the relentless tide of life than left for him to clutch to his chest, especially while he hung around with Jean.

“What the fuck was that?” was the best Jean could come up with.

“Ahaha, bless. Armin, I think Jean’s a little jealous of the attention Mikasa gave you,” Marco said softly, winking. Armin always admired how Marco managed to say even the most sharp-ended things without even a hint of malice in his voice, but on this occasion, it served to grate on him slightly. Maybe he subconsciously blamed Marco for Eren running away. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. But Armin felt bad, therefore Marco being his usual mild self was somewhat irritating.

“No, fuck that. Look at… Fuck, Armin, you can’t have seriously fallen in love with that twerp, have you?”

Armin managed to gather his wits enough to retort, “That “twerp” that you’ve not yet apologised to for beating up, huh?”

Jean looked crushed. “I won’t agree to it. You can’t.”

“You sound jealous.”

There was a heavy pause.

“So… Are you gonna…” Jean looked down at his fingers.

“What?”

“See… Mikasa?”

“I wonder what that’s about, huh. I mean, she and Eren…” Marco mused.

“Ha, Jean isn’t interested in that. He just wants her phone number.” 

His words came out pricklier than he had intended. Perhaps that was why Jean didn’t answer. Then again, perhaps it was because the bell rang, and the whole situation seemed to become of nothing when Armin realised the weight of the textbooks crammed into his rucksack. Fifteen minutes later and no one would remember the conversation held across the classroom between the odd new girl and the class bookworm, let alone notice that Eren’s desk remained empty all morning. After all, what were human relationships when there were exams to be passed?

Armin of all people should know.


	4. Hypothesis

Armin half expected Jean or Marco to follow him to the science block that break, yet when he got to room C3- a classroom used by teachers as a dumping ground for student’s papers, and by students as a place to avoid teachers- he found it vacant. In fact, it was eerie how quiet the corridors became during breaks, with the science corridor in particular being out-of-bounds. He could hear the wind whistling though the gap in the window pane, and he moved to run his finger through the gap, whilst leaning to see two floors down to the courtyard below. He just about made out Sasha and Connie causing mischief with a Brötchen between them, but other than that, it was the same worn-out, grey faces; people going places and doing things Armin had no interest in.

Mikasa scuffed the door on purpose. Armin knew she could be as silent as cancer if she wanted to, to the extent of creeping up behind him and standing there, waiting, but on this occasion it seemed important that Armin start on her side, so to speak.

“Um… So…” Some may have expected Armin, as a smart individual, to be careful with words, but he had a habit of throwing them about at the worst of times.

“Armin, what do you think of Eren?” She walked as she talked, taking silent steps and holding Armin’s gaze like a hand round his neck.

“I… I’ve only just met him. I-I-I mean, um… You guys only arrived the other week, so… Um… I like him though…”

Mikasa was like a book character- a very extreme character, almost unreal in the way she reacted to the world around her. For example, she seemed to be reading Armin; even though her eyes, as usual, were a flat, lugubrious brown, untelling of any thought or process. “You have questions.”

“Um… I guess so. I… I mean, why did you bring me here? I-Is this some kind of interrogation? Why do you care about me? Jealousy? If you are jealous, I suppose it’s well-founded- well, no, wait, your thought process is probably logical, I mean, not that Eren and I… We don’t… Um…”

He wasn’t sure if it was calculated to the effect it gave, but Mikasa sitting down next to him on the table and pushing her hair out of her face gave her a strange air of amicability, even a hint of vulnerability. 

“I get the impression you’re smart, but you’re over-thinking this. You and I, we want the same thing for Eren.”

That was the most he’d ever heard her say. It was also the softest he’d heard her voice: a small hint of the tenderness in her relationship with the boy who had somehow bought this odd pair together.

“P-Probably.” He took a deep breath. “Um… It’s selective mutism, right?”

“Yes.” She paused. “And self-harm, suicidal tendencies, explosive anger and social anxiety.

The wind was whistling again, blowing a chill down Armin’s neck. Mikasa was starting into the middle distance, a dejected looseness hung across her expression.

“He also has a great smile, a strange habit with cucumber slices and an ineffable ability to perceive the weak point of others and subsequently cover it up with something beautiful out of the blue…”

“Yes.” 

“Can I ask… How do you two know each other?” Armin was looking down at his fingers now. He didn’t want to look at her: he kept seeing glimpses of emotion flashing across her face that he didn’t want to recognise, because recognising it would mean knowing and knowing meant Armin was too invested. Mikasa was, at the moment, a force to be reckoned with. Nothing more, nothing less. 

And yet, there he was, asking questions about their life. 

“What’s it to you?”

“Y-You know where my apartment is. I’m allowed something in return.” His voice was harder than he felt.

“I found that out for myself.”

“By chance. And I’m finding this out, by asking you.”

She acquiesced. “We live together, with Eren’s mum.”

“So you’re not related?”

Armin could almost hear the smile passing over Mikasa’s lips, but he didn’t dare look, because he knew as soon as he said it that it was a stupid question. That, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what kind of smile it was.

“Do we look related?” 

The question was rhetorical, but it didn’t stop Armin feeling the air go thick with his silence, as her words rang in his ears like a disease.

Armin never thought anything interesting would happen in his life. He felt he lived in a liminal state: never without acquaintances but never with good friends; never consumed by any emotion in particular except perhaps boredom; he didn’t dream but he had his future planned out until the age of 21; and above all, nothing interesting ever happened to him. Every week in the life of Armin Arlert had been almost the same for as far back as he could remember, his weekends fading into a mist of markets, homework and rented DVDs, interspersed with house parties attended by the same group of people, where nothing happened and nobody remembered. At least that was the case up until the point where Mikasa leaned forward and whispered that proposal that would turn his life on its head.

“Armin, I need you to help me help Eren.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Social anxiety is actually a symptom of selective mutism, but as the idea is that Eren's never been formally diagnosed, Mikasa distinguishes the two. The other things aren't related to the mutism, though. Explanation later.
> 
> Sorry for my crappy writing style, idk how to write dialogue really.


	5. Opening

Armin wouldn’t call it a project. After all, there was no endgame, regardless of his fantasies where Eren would realise how truly amazing he was and stop hurting himself, or where Eren would whisk Armin into those bony arms of his and plant a perfect little kiss on his rosy cheek. Nor was there any plan; with Mikasa giving him nothing more than a meeting point for after school, and what might be considered a kind parting smile as she exited the science classroom, the door creaking quietly behind her.

Plus, Eren wasn’t a subject. Eren was the most human one could be: he was the face Armin saw in a crowd, the one standing in the middle of a corridor while everyone walked round him, the face in a world of blanks.

It was a strange request. Armin couldn’t help his mind ticking over it during maths, and in history, as he watched Eren scribbling notes at the front of the class. She “needed” him? Armin had never been told he was needed before, let alone by a girl who seemed so wholly capable of anything. Maybe she did have a plan, and Armin was merely being manipulated: it would explain why Mikasa hadn’t mentioned anything concrete. She didn’t seem like the sort of girl who would go out of her way to cover up her ulterior motives when her intellect was so easily hidden by her quizzical and enigmatic exterior. 

And then… “need”. As if Eren was in some kind of danger without Armin. It was hard to believe, and even harder to work out why Mikasa would find it auspicious to suggest that. Eren was mute, but he wasn’t incapable of defending himself. Indeed, Armin thought as Eren raised his hand for third time that lesson, showing the teacher the second notebook he now kept with him to write conversations down in, he wasn’t incapable of anything, and most certainly not modern history.

“He never smiles,” Jean muttered to him, and Armin saw Marco lean into the conversation from his desk.

“Who?” Armin whispered, furrowing his brow a Jean, who was twiddling his pen between his fingers and intermittently letting it tap the desk. 

“You know, for someone with the best grades in forever, you’re really fucking stupid sometimes. Eren. You’ve been staring at him for the past 20 minutes?” 

Jean evidently wasn’t as dumb as his haircut made him out to be. The self-obsessed and candidly smug expression on his face, however, when Armin inadvertently blushed, was just as annoying as always.

“Has he?” Marco chipped in, slightly too loud, as Jean kicked him under the desk and a girl Armin forgot the name of glanced round at the trio. 

“’S because he keeps answering questions,” Armin said coolly, though couldn’t help but check himself as he found his line of sight wandering back towards the front of the class. It was true though- he wasn’t sure he’d seen Eren this animated about anything before, not that he’d known him that long. Did he like history? What was it about history, Armin found himself thinking, as he stared at the notebook on Eren’s desk, its pages pulled back over the spine and margins abused with noncommittal pen squiggles. It was only then, as he heard Jean giggle, that he realised he’d done it again- he was indeed absolutely transfixed on Eren goddamn Jaeger. 

“S-Shut up, Jean,” he muttered, blushing harder this time and only cursing himself when he felt the tips of his ears go red. He found his mind wandering back to the morning, Eren complimenting him and consequently bunking his lessons, Jean hanging on (as he still was) to the way Armin acted when Eren was in the room… And then there was Mikasa. Somehow, all these things didn’t fit. If he was supposedly necessary in Mikasa’s plan to help Eren, then why did Armin only serve to make things worse for him? Jean wouldn’t notice Eren further than their scrap on the previous Friday if it weren’t for Armin’s ridiculous blushing, Eren wouldn’t have skipped his lessons if it weren’t for Armin’s mere existence; and now Eren was turning round to look at them- he could hear Jean giggling- and he saw Jean punch Armin lightly in the arm as he looked straight at him. Armin didn’t catch his facial expression as he turned back round in his seat, but Armin knew what it would be like, having already been there: the boy sat at the front of the class, hearing someone laughing and feeling their eyes bore into the back of his head. 

The frustrating thing was, he wasn’t even friends with Jean. It was merely by association, that since Armin had once followed "that douchebag with the undercut” around like a forlorn yet amorous puppy, that meant they somehow were still friends. If Armin himself had to put it down to one thing, it would be that no one changed friends enough to warrant changing the seating plans at the start of the new school year, hence Armin was stuck, in the previous year’s wisdom, sat next to Jean for all lessons except German. Eren, on the other hand, played the missing part; he and Mikasa slotting in wherever there was an empty desk as if where they sat were some kind of intricate code. In reality, the relationship between Armin and Jean had soured a bit. Marco- poor Marco- was now the boy smitten with the class “jock”; whereas Armin was alone, people still thinking he was friends with Jean from the fact they sat together and because Jean had an irritating habit of being unable to shut his face.

Time must have passed after that, because he had the notes on Hindenburg’s presidency to prove it. So he hadn’t slept or been distracted, but mulling over his conversation with Jean in bed later that night, he came to realise that everything from the moment Jean was yelled out for making goofy faces to the second after the bell rang was a complete blur. He had a memory problem sometimes where he’d repeat himself or forget little details, simply because life often became too mundane to bother remembering. Yet, of course, he could remember Eren’s exact expression as he walked up to his desk as everyone left out the back: it was one of cautious contentment.

Eren held up a note, prewritten. _Mikasa said you were going to hang out with us?_

“Um… Ah… Y-Yeah. Wait a minute,” Armin said, flustering with the contents of his bag, Eren watching him bemusedly as he shoved papers into his notebooks. He threw his bag violently over one shoulder. “Ready?”

And there it was again: Eren’s smile. Jean was right, he wasn’t as fast and loose with his facial expressions as most people, so much so that he could understand a girl he’d overheard that morning mentioning how Eren always seemed angry. Eren had a right to be angry, of course, but he also had a right to be happy: and if Eren being happy meant Armin got to gaze upon his cheeky smile more often, he would champion this right as much as the USA championed unfettered capitalism.

“So, do you know where we’re meeting Mikasa?” Armin asked casually as he followed Eren out of the classroom, and Eren made an expression that made him look momentarily dumb, as he squinted into the middle-distance, before extracting his phone from his jeans pocket. It wasn’t a flashy variety, more a functional, middle-of-the range thing, probably second-hand, unless Eren had inflicted those scratches on it himself. Eren slowed down as he unlocked it, opening his messages and opening one of three conversations held there, which he held up to Armin. It was a text from Mikasa, but Armin didn’t get as far as reading it as the phone buzzed and a message icon obscured the screen.

Armin couldn’t help but notice how Eren made a little “ah” with his mouth, though no noise came out. He read the text and frowned.

“Eren and Armin, sitting in a tree…” came a sing song voice, as Jean swaggered up to them, Marco in tow. Eren scowled as they walked past, initially mostly perturbed by the fact he’d been distracted, though the lines of his scowl deepened as he recognised Jean from his fight on the Friday. The moment Jean made kissing noises as he walked away was the very moment Eren snapped, and Armin watched in amazement as Eren took of his shoe and threw it straight at Jean’s head. Armin wasn’t sure if it was more satisfying to see what a great shot Eren was from what was probably 8 metres away, or to hear the resounding _slap_ the sole of his trainer made at it made contact.

What was even more surprising is that Eren had risen to the same level of anger as on Friday- one that took him out of his mutism and let him yell “FUCK YOU” down the corridor. This action took both boys by surprise, as Jean took a moment to compute- Armin could virtually see the cogs working- what had just happened. Eren, meanwhile, seemed shocked and perhaps even disgusted by the sound of his own voice. This was when Jean picked up the shoe and threw it back, missing Eren, and broke into a run. Eren took this opportunity run away from him, still holding his phone and now only wearing one shoe. He ducked into the boys toilets and both Jean and Armin heard the click of the lock behind him.

Why did the boys toilets lock?

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE JAEGER, DAMMIT.” Jean turned to Armin, the latter too dumbstruck with the simultaneous stupidity and brilliance of Eren’s actions. Marco handed Armin Eren’s shoe, which he couldn’t much say he particularly wanted. “Do you believe me yet, Armin? Fucking nuts. Who the fuck even throws a shoe? And how come he won’t speak but he’ll yell at me, huh? Is he faking it?” He kicked the door, as if redirecting his open question.

“Shut up Jean, you’re embarrassing yourself,” Armin clenched the shoe. “Who… Who would even fake that sort of thing? O-Optionally?” Armin hated himself for saying that- something about it made Eren sound tragic, and while it wouldn’t matter if he was, Eren was not tragic: he was an enigma, albeit one with smelly trainers.

“He’s already got your twisted round his little finger, huh? I wouldn’t have put you down as someone who fell for such a dumbass.”

“Eren’s not a dumbass, and I haven’t changed my feelings about anyone except you, Jean… You… You…” 

Armin was surprised to find himself choking up. Why? He didn’t have anything to feel sad about- if anything, anyone who walked down the corridor in that very moment might have found the situation quite funny: a boy insistent on not leaving the closed bathroom door unattended, staring at two boys, one of whom was now crying whilst clutching a shoe that clearly wasn’t his own.

He tried in vain to wipe his tear away with his sleeve. Perhaps it was the shock of a fight; it really had been a long time since Armin had properly engaged with anyone, let alone fought, and it was just so emotionally exhausting. He thought about how stupid he looked, and hoped Eren had found a way to escape out of the bathroom window and shin down the wall (it would, after all, be just the sort of thing that Eren would do), lest Armin have to look at him with puffy eyes and a broken spirit. 

Oh, Mikasa, he thought. He couldn’t even help himself- how was he supposed to help cucumber boy?

Maybe when Eren came out of the bathroom, he’d see right through Armin. He’d pretend he didn’t exist- no, he really wouldn’t see Armin at all, but it wouldn’t bother him. He wouldn’t remember anything as he flung his bag over his shoulder and drowned his head in drum and bass, crossing the courtyard without looking back, without thinking, without remembering.

“Fuck it. Jesus, Armin, there’s no need to be such a girl. Urgh… Marco, you wanna go get a McFlurry or something?” 

The way Jean massaged his own head made it seem as if he were obsessively flattening some unseen creases in the fabric of his own skin.

“You coming then or what?” Jean veiled his tone of voice with fake annoyance, but he wasn’t annoyed: it was obvious, he wouldn’t have offered out a hand if he weren’t feeling guilty.

For a moment, Armin did consider it. He’d be less of a burden to Eren if Eren didn’t care about him any longer.

Except it was Mikasa, her grey and goose-down eyes swimming in his mind’s eye, which stopped him.

“‘Girl’ isn’t an insult, Jean.”

“Suit yourself.”

Perhaps seeing Jean turn his back on him might have been the worst thing to happen to him a few years previously. Now, however, it served no emotion to Armin, who if anything felt relieved that he could properly wipe his tears without pretending he wasn’t crying. There was no guilt, not this time; no self-loathing either, just a weary sense of relieve that he no longer had to pretend to care, that he no longer had to waste his time in another conversation he had no need to be engaged in.

The moment it took for Jean and Marco to skulk out of view wasn’t long enough for it to occur to Armin that Eren might notice Armin’s red-rimmed eyes, so Eren’s surprised expression as the bathroom lock clicked open came as a bit of a shock to Armin. 

Or was it? Was it the expression on Eren’s face, or was it the way he leaned in to Armin, as if trying to suss him out? Was it the way he was so hesitant in reaching up to wipe a stray tear from Armin’s burning cheek, anxiety almost getting the better of him; and the way it killed Armin to watch him deliberating with himself behind those telling eyes? Or was it, indeed, because Eren’s eyelids fluttered, like the wings of a dying butterfly, and his lips parted slighty, as if he was going to say something; except then he pulled away. But it was too late. Armin’s breath was dry in his throat. 

He’d seen. Eren had glanced back up at him.

Eren’s pupils had dilated.

Caught in his own logic-driven mind, a maelstrom of thoughts hit him at once, and he almost found himself kneeling under the intensity of it. The first most feral thoughts, were to grab the taller boy right there and… what? That’s where the next thoughts came in, bombarding him with a hundred questions about what it meant, if anything. Had Eren wanted to kiss him? Why? Why when his face was red and his eyes sore from wiping them with his sleeve? 

After that followed the more long-term consequences of this action- what was Mikasa going to say? Would she mind? If she did mind, was it because it would screw with Eren when he really needed to be kept out of trouble (a mean feat though that might be), or because she herself had feelings for Eren? If she did, then what? Armin had hidden his feelings fine before, but it hadn’t ended how he would have hoped, thinking of Jean’s scathing backward glance.

Eren had momentarily turned around so Armin couldn’t see his face, searching for something in his rucksack, which, judging by his frantic movements, was not neatly organised like Armin’s. In the consequent seconds, while Armin had been preoccupied with the ragings of his own brain, he’d scribbled something in red pen on the back of what looked like his unfinished Economics homework, which Armin now found stuffed in his hands, as Eren dashed, once more, into the bathroom.

_Won’t be a minute._

Indeed, he wasn’t a minute. He didn’t time it, but it was definitely longer than a minute. It was however long it took for Armin to become self-conscious about standing in a school after-hours (did Eren do this often or was it just when Armin was around?), long enough to slide down the wall, staring at the toilet door opposite, but not long enough for the thoughts to stop whirling or for his cheeks to return to their normal pasty hue. He came to the conclusion that Eren was on the phone, muttering things Armin couldn’t hear, no matter how hard he tried.

The explanation came in the same spidery red handwriting, this time in the book he usually used to communicate.

_Mikasa texted me before to say she can’t come, and she wouldn’t tell me why not?? I’m still cool to hang with it, if it doesn’t make you uncomfortable? I get it if you’ve got homework or something._

Armin looked up at Eren. He had come out of the bathroom looking exactly the same as when he went in, save for two small details Armin picked up on: firstly, that his hair was much messier, dragged backwards as if he’d been stood in a wind tunnel, and of course, his pupils were smaller now, though still not quite normal size, Armin reckoned.

“Um… No. I… Why would I be uncomfortable?” He smiled, except it faltered when he wondered if that was the impression he gave off. But Eren? Eren didn’t seem to care, kicking his shoe back onto his foot and pocketing the lid of his pen, supposedly ready to hold a conversation.

Why would Mikasa bail out? On top of everything else- what did that mean?

That reminded Armin. 

“Hey, Eren,” he said, as Eren offered him a hand up. Armin accepted before continuing his point, taking a moment to notice that up his sleeves, Eren was still wearing the bandages Armin had applied at the end of the previous week. Or at least, they looked similar. 

Eren was still looking at him with those piercing eyes of his as they started along the corridor, and Armin blushed as he realised he’d forgotten to finish speaking.

“Oh… Oh yeah, I was going to ask… Um… Do you speak sign language?” It sounded stupid once the words had rolled over his lips, but Eren’s face lit up. He did a hand gesture, holding his palm open pointedly, folding it into a fist, opened it, and folded it again, only this time folding two fingers of the fist over the other two.

Armin realised that he’d probably asked the wrong question. Indeed, it had been more of a suggestion than a question, but then it was Armin’s own fault for underestimating the one and only Eren Jaeger. He looked pleased about it though, so perhaps he’d hit the spot when it came to the conversation starter to get them over the numerous events of the last ten minutes.

Armin’s heart was still echoing in his chest.

“Ah… What does that mean?” Armin smiled, and this time it didn’t falter.

Eren pointed to himself. Armin’s cynical side listed a number of words- puzzling, trouble, hot, weird, new, interesting, lanky- that he thought the word could describe, before connecting two and two. Four gestures. Four letters.

“Oh… It’s your name. Ehh… Anything else? I don’t know any, ha. I don’t know why I asked, I’m being put to shame.” The reply was vague, Eren pulling a face and wiggling his hands in a non-committal fashion.

And that was it. Eren may have not been able speak, but there was little impediment to his communication. The fact that his mutism obviously did him harm aside, it was invigorating in a way, to see one person say so many things in so many ways, with no spoken words at all. He threw his hands about, flourishing his pad of paper and pulling all manner of faces (though smiling was, as Jean had said, a rarity). The most interesting part, however, would always be Eren’s eyes. Living in Berlin, life could be quite grey, and he’d never really seen such things as the purling of the ocean or the dunes of a desert. Yet, somehow, all of these things existed in Eren’s eyes: his odd heterochromatic eyes, where Armin could gaze deep into a pit of gold and fire and a field on a summer’s day simultaneously, for as long as Eren would hold eye contact.


	6. Point

“I still can’t believe you threw that shoe at Jean,” Armin giggled, tripping over the step of the corner shop as they exited with their drinks.

Eren’s reply was just one word, as he seemed more preoccupied with sating his thirst with a drink Armin had never come across before. It looked like ice tea, except it was green. _Douchebag._

Hanging out (as Eren had called it) with Eren was certainly something special. He’d yet to broach the subject of Mikasa’s absence, but maybe it was because Eren acted differently when Mikasa was around that Armin was somewhat avoiding the subject anyway.

“I… I’m sorry about him, y’know. I-It probably… You probably wouldn’t like me saying, but he’s not terrible. He just doesn’t like things that don’t fit.”

Of course, it was natural that a brother and sister (they were that until Armin worked out if Mikasa really was romantically interested in Eren) would act differently around each other than with someone they’d only known for a few days, but Armin couldn’t help thinking there was more to it. Mikasa, for one, was far too attentive, to the point of obsession. Was it suffocating Eren, or was he loath to stand his own ground when he had someone who would willingly do it for him? Was Mikasa just perpetuating his problems?

No, Armin shook his head, that wasn’t it. While Eren didn’t seem to show any contempt for Mikasa or her mothering to her face, Eren clearly felt he could manage on his own, starting fights and remaining independent in class. But then he’d been so frantic to ring Mikasa when he found out that she wasn’t to join him and Armin: it didn’t match up.

Armin didn’t realised how much he’d drifted off into his own thoughts until Eren shoved his pad of paper obnoxiously under Armin’s nose. _You’re probably right, but there’s no way I’m going to know that if he continues to be such a horsefaced git._ And then, added underneath, he’d written, _What are you shaking your head about??_

He decided to be honest. “Mikasa,” he admitted, and Eren’s expression changed to one Armin wasn’t really sure what to make of. His brows furrowed, which with any other person would indicate anger or concern, but on Eren seemed merely his natural expression. Not to mention, there was little emotion in his eyes at that point- not that Armin got much of a chance to look, as Eren suddenly became very interested in the wrapper of his bottle of weird cold tea.

“Do you not like her?” Armin knew as soon as the words left his mouth that they were the wrong ones, yet Eren didn’t look as hurt as Armin would have expected. All the same, he felt bad. In fact, seeing Eren’s expression die as it did after he’d spent so long giving Armin those beautiful content smiles since they’d left the Gymnasium only served to deepen Armin’s guilt. “I-I’m sorry, I… It doesn’t matter. That was rude.” His hair fell in front of his eyes, and he was glad that it did, because he didn’t want to see the look Eren gave him.

Except Eren wasn’t beside him. Eren was three metres ahead of him, edging around a group of tourists. Armin almost thought he was leaving him, until a few seconds later, when he saw him notice Armin’s absence and look around frantically. In fact, it was more than frantic. Armin had never considered it possible to look so horrifyingly full of dread before, but then, he’d never seen someone have a panic attack.

Armin would later learn that what he did next was just about the right thing. However, in the seconds following the moment when Eren stopped in his tracks, and the full weight of the darkening sky seemed to fall visibly on his head, Armin had no idea what to do. In fact, his first thought was spent wishing Mikasa were there. For this, he scolded himself. He then, slowly but surely, gathered his senses and approached Eren where he was now effectively frozen in the middle of the bustling street.

“Um… Eren? Eren, you’re OK.” It felt good saying Eren’s name: it was a reassurance, a secret pact of acquaintance between the pair. That said, there was something wholly unnerving about the way Eren looked at Armin, not registering him at all. His notebook was limp in his hands, and Armin noticed he’s started writing something, but it was illegible. “Eren? It’s me, Armin, Eren. Umm… I… I think we should get out of here. I… I’m going to take your hand.”

Armin began to panic when Eren stopped noticing what Armin was telling him. He kept looking straight ahead, forehead creased with worry but eyes not seeing, not registering anything but thin air. People were watching. People were everywhere.

Eren looked sweaty, but when Armin finally mustered up the courage to take his hand, it was clammy and cold, as if he’d died.

Once Armin had a firm hold of the one hand he would have considered it so incredibly romantic to hold, it was like something clicked, and suddenly he was the reliable, top grades Armin Arlert, all composure and neat hair. He knew exactly what his aim was as he guided Eren gently through the crowd, reassuring him every step. It was an Armin many people had probably once known, until the boy had quietly slipped with stress and loneliness during puberty and became an altogether different person by the time he found himself taking his Abitur. 

It was only once they found themselves in front of the Brandenburg Gate, with its slowly easing number of mild-mannered tourists and yellow glow in the dusk, that Armin and Eren found themselves calming down. For a few minutes, Eren sat at the bottom of a pillar, drinking in the cool air deeply as if he’d been starved of it for a long, long time. He sated his thirst in large gulps that momentarily made Armin wonder if he’d end up with an unconscious boy on his hands; alas, after about a minute, the twinkle seemed to reappear in Eren’s eyes and he looked up quietly at the gate.

Armin was used to being invisible. If one didn’t make a point for long enough, it was easy for an individual to become inconsequential: doubly so in the overwhelming whirlpool of the education system. In a way, Armin liked this. Or at least, the selfish part of him did: the part that secretly looked down on the world as a self-preservation mechanism, the part that liked to be alone in the library, just working. Yet as he watched Eren admire the way the lights shone on the majestic statues that reared over the Gate’s entrance, he questioned his own thinking and premonitions about the world. Was it society’s folly that one could so easily fall through the gaps, often not even to the benefit of the many? It physically hurt for Armin to try to conceive a world wherein someone was not there for Eren when he became like this.

_I’m sorry._

“NO!” Armin shouted, and Eren jumped. There was a moment of misunderstanding, in which Eren looked ready to arch his defense, squaring his shoulders at the other boy, but his actions quickly reversed when he saw Armin rub tears from his eyes. 

Of course, Armin cursed internally, of course he was crying again.

“I… I… Um… No. I…” He took a second, inhaling, breathing the same air Eren had drank so thirstily. A deviant part of his brain found itself asking if Eren would drink the air from his mouth, putting his cool hands on his flushed face and leaving him breathless, but Armin remained externally unscathed by this thought. “Eren, please don’t be sorry. That’s the absolute last thing I want you to be, please…”

Yet, of course there was a world where someone wasn’t there for Eren. No amount of naivety could obscure that thought from Armin, no matter how much he arrogantly he tried to rationalise Eren. While nothing may have caused Eren’s mutism or social anxiety, something had perpetuated them, and something had driven him to want to hurt himself, to want to kill himself. 

This revelation hurt. He wasn’t sure why it should, being that it wasn’t him who was currently had bandages wrapped around his tender wrists, but it did. It physically hurt.

Armin could see Eren struggling on what to write to make Armin feel better. Once again, guilt overflowed in his mind, and all of a sudden he was bubbling with self-loathing, wishing he wasn’t such a burden on people and that he could just somehow help Eren without making everything about him. 

He wasn’t sure how much it had taken for Eren to muster up the courage to embrace Armin, but it couldn’t have been too far outside the stubborn teenager’s scope, as once he’d looped his arms around Armin and rested his chin on Armin’s shoulder, he seemed to acquaint himself with the shape of Armin’s body, his form loosening of its former anxiety. They stayed stood there for quite a while, in fact. Armin wondered if it were possible for him to be even more anxious than Eren, as he could hear his heart pounding in his ears, and feared Eren could feel it. 

Eren didn’t smell of much. He was clean, and if Armin had been bold enough to draw his hands through Eren’s scruffy hair, he would have found it soft and smelling faintly of Mikasa’s shampoo. There was, however, no odour of cologne or deodorant (Jean had always smelt of a certain expensive smelling perfume), just a soft, homely sense about the boy, with his own smell faint behind the fabric of his jumper.

He didn’t notice Eren open his mouth three times, trying to say something but each time failing. And, alas, when the moment passed and they broke apart, whatever Eren had wanted to say was no longer appropriate, or was in some way lost, and Armin never knew.

They ended up sitting beneath the pillar for quite a while, letting night fall around the like it always did; except, this evening, it was quiet and noticed by the pair, who watched the clouds turn pink, purple and the sky slowly fading to a light-polluted black over the skyline of the city.

Armin was glad he’d bought his jacket again by 6, pulling it around him subtly so Eren wouldn’t notice him starting to feel the cold. He was distracted by the lights of the gate, finding in them unmatched wonder. Armin wanted to admire the way he looked at them, his eyes twinkling, his dark skin a warm hue, his soft lips slightly parted but still, miles away from the frantic inhaling of twenty minutes previously. On the notebook beside him, the only thing written, in relatively small letters at the top of the page, was his small apology, and beneath, a frustrated scribble on which he’d pressed down so hard on the page that he’d made a little tear, the dried biro glistening slightly in the dim light.

“Um… Do you like history, then?”

Eren frowned.

_Modern history only, ancient history is boring._

“What… Wait… You… We took that busy street because you wanted to come here, didn’t you?” Eren didn’t need to reply; his expression told Armin everything. If it weren’t for the fact that Eren’s panic attack had been terrifying for both of them, it seemed quite heroic, really. “Why the Brandenburg Gate? I-If you don’t mind me asking. W-Wait, it has to do with modern history, I get that…”

_My family is East German. They don’t talk about it, but I think if I understood history more then maybe…_ He stopped writing, looked at Armin, and then scribbled out the last bit, replacing it with _I’m not really smart like you so I don’t get much in school, but stuff about the Wall is really interesting. So I like coming here and remembering all that doesn’t exist anymore._

“So do you come here a lot then?” 

Eren stretched out his legs, scowling at his feet, before shaking his head. 

Something about the way Eren acted inclined Armin not to pursue the conversation any further. He supposed if Eren had that kind of reaction to crowds, he’d probably be inclined to avoid tourist hot-spots such as this: but then, there seemed to be something missing. It was true, he was interested in modern history, the enthusiasm had been clear from all the way at the back of class, but what did this all have to do with his family being East German? Armin was under the impression it didn’t really matter these days- kids being born these days had parents who were born after the Wall fell, so it was becoming less and less relevant, even to older children like Eren. 

After a few minutes of what felt like tense silence, Eren got to his feet, stretching his arms out like an awkward cat before turning to Armin and offering him a hand up. Armin accepted, blushing, but calmed down once again when he was told _I’ll walk you back._

They didn’t hold hands after that. It wasn’t necessary, of course. Armin had kept an eye on Eren to begin with, but he began to see the rising irritation in Eren’s expression, and stopped, choosing to look quietly down at his own feet instead. He felt as if he’d screwed up somehow- he’d been doing so well in getting to know Eren, and suddenly it was as if Eren had frozen him out, becoming the silent, scowling boy the rest of the world knew him as. It was selfish to wonder if Mikasa would be annoyed at having sent him back in a despondent state, having made no progress in helping him in whatever way he was supposed to be helping him; yet that was the first thing he thought about as Eren bade him goodbye absent-mindedly, not looking Armin in the eye. 

Even if it was too dark to see far enough in the cold evening air, Armin didn’t stay long enough on the porch of his apartment block to see Eren turn back to look at him at the end of the street. Indeed, nor did Armin notice Eren taking the wrong turning, wandering away from his own apartment block with is hands stuffed deep into his pockets and his face obscured by the shadow of his hood. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I used the word "homely" to describe the way Armin finds Eren's smell, I of course mean that Eren has his own natural scent like everyone one else, but I also wanted to use the German word "heimlich"- which means "homely", but is also the opposite of "unheimlich", the German originally used by Freud to talk about what we refer to as the "uncanny". Unfortunately, y'all would have Google Translated it which gives you the wrong meaning.
> 
> Freud, while his work is sexist trash, is worth studying (literature-wise only) if you take his work as a single analysis and apply it as a metaphor, eg, penis envy in literature, but supplementing the word "penis" in his theory with "power" and essentially finding yourself with a feminist critique that gives insight on how a character might act for a certain reason. Freud you should perhaps think about if you want to know where this is going. Also the Berlin Wall. Which is a metaphor for the SNK canon, yes, but I also really like German history... Plus, insight into Eren/Mikasa's motivations yeaaaahhhh
> 
> Comments, questions, pointing out my errors...?


	7. Example

Armin’s mum was quietly bemused to come home to find her son cooking dinner with his phone in one hand. The truth was, he’d argued with himself all the way up the three flights of stairs about apologising to Eren. He considered ringing him, wondering if Eren could talk over the phone, before remembering that even he himself got nervous over the phone and therefore it would be thousands of times worse for someone who couldn’t even talk to him indirectly. This was where the idea for messaging came from- after all, most of Eren’s communication was of the written kind, so surely a text would be nice.

Except he didn’t have Eren’s phone number.

He did, however, have Mikasa’s, as she’d given it to him before leaving the science classroom, in the form of a neatly folded piece of paper hooked into his jeans pocket. He’d almost forgotten it, and was pleased to find it still in his pocket, more crumpled but still wholly intact.

**Hi Mikasa, could I have Eren’s phone number? :)**

As he’d been chopping the onions, she’d called him. She was certainly less intimidating over the phone, but it wasn’t as easy to pick up on the subtleties in her voice that made conversations with her so fixating and memorable.

“Armin?”

“Uh…” He nearly dropped the phone as he adjusted it against his ear, before coughing nervously and continuing, “Hi Mikasa.”

“When did Eren leave you?”

“Um… It must have been about… about 45 minutes ago, maybe, I think.” He scraped the onions into the pan, and cursed as the oil spat at him. He’d left it on heat to long before adding the ingredients, he’d been distracted. 

“You’re at home,” Mikasa surmised quietly in his ear. 

“Yeah.” The more verbose Armin would have made a joke about burning the onions, but Armin as he was was even loath the say, “Eren dropped me back. A-Are you telling me he’s not home?”

There was a silence, in which Armin listened to the slight buzz of static in his ear. Mikasa was somewhere quiet- probably at home- so why was she whispering? 

Armin should probably keep his nose out, but he couldn’t help but be interested by the dynamics of Eren’s family. Mikasa should have been a warning sign: she obviously cared about Eren and that was nice, Armin thought, but she was almost obsessive sometimes and other times letting him go out alone with Armin, despite the fact he’d had a panic attack and Armin hadn’t known how to deal with it. And then there was Eren’s reactions to her, and the talk of his family. His reactions to Mikasa weren’t stable; plus, it bugged Armin that Eren had talked about his “family” whereas Mikasa had only mentioned “Eren’s mum”. Did he consider her family while she detached herself from Eren and his mother? Or was Eren talking about someone else- a dad, maybe?

Armin wouldn’t call him and his mum a “family”. They’d never done family things, nor had either of them tried to live up to any social roles that being in a family might bring about. Though it was possible, he considered, that Eren thought differently on such matters.

“What did you do?”

“Oh… This afternoon? We, er… We wandered, I guess- after Jean and Eren had had another fight- and ended up at the Brandenburg Gate after Eren kind of had a panic attack.”

“The Brandenburg Gate?” Her voice was sharp, like a pin in a balloon.

“That’s what you picked up on? He… He had a panic attack. And you’ve not answered my question,” Armin frowned. The onions were burning. “I know Eren can fend for himself, but he didn’t seem right when he left me but I figured it wasn’t too long until he got home and saw you and you’d probably understand better. Except, right now, you’re trying to keep things from me. If you want me to help you and help him, then both of you have to trust me a little bit.”

After he closed his mouth, Armin once again found himself hating himself for having said too much. Mikasa’s slightly menacing aura evidently had its positives as well as negatives.

After a few seconds of thick, fuzzy silence, Armin heard the tone to indicate Mikasa had hung up.

He slammed his phone on the counter and took the now browned onions off the heat. Maybe it was none of his business, but then why had Mikasa been so inclined to ask for his help? It unnerved him still, because he wasn’t sure in what way he was supposed to be “helping” anyone. If that afternoon had been anything to go off, Armin had just stirred up some things Eren obviously hadn’t wanted to discuss, and done a bad job with helping with his panic attack.  
Suddenly, the image of Eren looking up at him from under his eyelashes, pupils blown wide as if he were on drugs, his lips parted in light arousal, flashed into Armin’s mind, and he blushed a deep crimson colour, shaking his head to rid himself of the memory.

Deciding to distract himself, Armin set about salvaging the pasta he’d been trying to make before he’d been so untimely distracted. It wasn’t as if he stopped thinking of Eren, the same questions still repeating themselves at the fore of his mind, but he blocked out the negative things, instead smiling to himself about how nice it had been to talk about stuff in general with him. It had been a while since Armin had done that with someone of his own age. Eren had indeed shown a genuine interest in Armin when he talked about schoolwork and exams; whereas with Jean, the conversations were at best strained, where neither side was listening to what the other was saying, just obnoxiously putting across their own point of view with Marco playing referee.

About a minute and a half before Armin’s mother walked through the front door of their poky flat, Armin’s phone buzzed. He’d almost forgotten about it, yet there it was, flashing away by the microwave as if it had been watching him muse. He snatched it up. A message from Mikasa.

**004930523437 and tell him Grisha isn’t in.**

Who on earth was Grisha, and why was he important to a boy who was out on his own in the dark on a school night, following a panic attack?

Armin didn’t have time for Mikasa’s strange ways at the moment, and vowed to text her later once she’d had time to mull his words over. For the moment, he rushed to input Eren’s number, drafting a text he hoped didn’t sound too clingy.

**Hi Eren, it’s Armin, Mikasa gave me your number. Apparently you’re still out? I’m really sorry if I upset you, I’m not very good at picking up when’s a bad time so I really didn’t mean it. Mikasa says Grisha isn’t in, idk what that means but if you’re avoiding going home then please don’t stay out in the cold, you’re welcome to have pasta with us? :)**

He considered putting a daring little kiss on the end, but it seemed cheap, so he abstained, sending the message quickly and continuing to clutch the phone while he drained the pasta, for his mum to then walk in and for them to pursue the tail of normality. 

“Do you want to know the secret ingredient?” he mumbled into his food. His voice was too monotonous for his mum to work out that it was a question, but that was fine. She was always too tired to answer. “It’s chilli oil.” The addition hung in the air, rang in Armin’s ears, contrasted too heavily with the dull clinking of their knives and forks against the white plastic-esque bowls from which they ate. Sometimes he wondered if this was how his entire life would play out: nothing more than monotony and a weary silence.

“Does that have to be there,” his mum asked, nodding half-heartedly at his phone on the right side of his placemat, blank screen staring up at him as if in jest of his loneliness. 

Except she was interrupted in continuing her point: not by the phone, unfortunately, but by the buzzer at the front of the flat. It had been so long since it had last rang that Armin had forgotten what it sounded like. He could tell, however, that the electronic resonance had some sort of loose connection as even though it was a relatively short ring, the sharp edge was clearly audible as the tone echoed through their apartment.

Armin took his phone with him, pointedly, when he went to answer it. 

“Hello?” When was the last time they had used the intercom? Maybe one day, they would be able to afford to live a little and order pizza to deliver, and he’d get to use it again.

For a few seconds, there was no reply.

“Armin, come down.” 

His heart skipped a beat. He was pretty sure he couldn’t mistake that rare voice anywhere; though he had to admit, it was strange hearing Eren talk normally, as opposed to throwing out callous base emotions or intoning an ephemeral whisper. Without romanticising Eren’s problems, it seemed a beautiful moment all the same. There was almost a hint of desperation, and Armin’s heart started racing as he was suddenly struck with the image of Eren that morning, a pen behind his ear, aura brightening as his eyes met Armin’s across the classroom.

Armin cursed himself internally as he hurriedly let himself out of the flat and began pounding down the stairs, almost tripping into the wall opposite him on the landing. Eren must have dropped Armin back just after half 6, after they’d taken the tram to avoid the busy streets in the centre of the city, and after having made his way upstairs, crashing out face-down on his bed in despair at having upset Eren, picking himself up to make dinner, texting Mikasa, salvaging dinner and then serving said meal and eating, time had taken its steady toll. Judging by the time on Armin’s phone, Eren had been outside a good hour and ten. Sure, Mikasa hadn’t said either way whether Eren had gone back or not, but he wagered she wouldn’t have rang him if she weren’t genuinely concerned, as she didn’t seem to be one to take a route of logic that would perpetuate idle chit-chat. Neither of the siblings were what one might be inclined to call effusive, in that way.  
No wonder Eren had sounded desperate. 

Armin didn’t hesitate before tearing the front door open. Perhaps he should have, as thought may have deterred him from such a dramatic action, and might have given him a chance to remind himself that the boy stood on the doorstep was one who made his heart clench and his mouth turn visibly down at the corners.

Eren looked surprised to see him. 

“Eren! You must be freezing!” He could see his breath in the light of the hallway, and it was obvious from the way he was huddled into his jumper that Armin wasn’t wrong. “Why don’t you come up? I-I really am sorry about before, I won’t ask questions if you don’t… Eren?” 

Armin had seen Eren’s face without the glow of recognition. After all, Eren had only been attending the same school for a few weeks, and they’d only started properly getting to know each other in the past few days. That, and Eren having a panic attack had quite obviously been unaware of Armin’s presence, too consumed with what looked like a crushing, mortal fear of something Armin could not see. The expression Eren wore on the doorstep of Armin’s apartment building wasn’t one of non-recognition, but in the same way, there was something not quite right about the way the light registered in his eyes.

The dark-haired boy took a step forward, holding Armin’s eye contact. He looked like he had a purpose for being there, on Armin’s doorstep. He didn’t look like he wanted to say something, not this time, but he did come across as having something he wanted to otherwise communicate.

That was, until he turned on his heel and sprinted back down the street, leaving nothing but a frustrated Armin and the sound of scuffing trainers etched into his short term memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 004930523437 is Germany's country code, Berlin's area code, and then JAEGER spelt on a phone keypad. I hope y'all appreciate my subtle sense of humour, even if the coding probably makes it a landline rather than a mobile. In Germany, they call a mobile "ein Handy", which I really wanted to use, but again, I didn't want to call it that in case I confused everybody. I'm probably confusing everyone as is by saying "mobile" rather than "cell".


	8. Quote

The whole affair confused Armin. He scraped the remainder of his tea in the bin, staring out the window at the evening traffic at the crossroads the whole time, before heading to his room, offering no explanation to his mother as to why he’d returned from answering the door looking so dejected. There, he lay on his bed, thinking of little except the expression on Eren’s face as he lay, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling. 

Eren didn’t come into school the next day. He’d meant to ask Mikasa about it- or about anything really- but he had a feeling she was avoiding him, as she was nowhere to be found during lunch. This, together with the fact that Jean and Marco were nowhere to be found, propelled Armin to hang about with Sasha and Connie- two people Armin saw as very much in love, whose goofing about may have annoyed others, but to Armin expressed what was lacking in Gymnasium life: a sense of fun, of freedom, of malicious-free intent, as well as some playful antics with Brötchen. 

Other than that, he haunted the library, just as he’d done before Eren had fallen so unceremoniously into his mundane life. The librarian- a man in his mid-thirties with an over-professed love for Coleridge and any other pious, drugged-up English writers of the Romantic period- watched him carefully. Perhaps someone had told him he’d stopped coming because he finally had friends. 

On Wednesday, it was as if nothing had happened. Armin, Eren and Mikasa sat together at lunch, talking about work half-heartedly and ignoring Jean as he swaggered past with Christa hanging on to his every word. 

Except it wasn’t as if nothing happened. For one thing, Eren in particular had changed a lot over the space of a day: a day that he didn’t seem to want to explain the use of. He may not have seem to have remembered fighting with Jean, or his panic attack, or waiting on Armin’s front steps for him to come down before leaving him, but he had a split lip. Not even a small cut: it covered almost the whole left side of his bottom lip, splaying out into a slight bruise on his cheek in hues of yellow and deep purple. His expression, too, was somewhat gloomier; he looked tired, and Mikasa kept shooting him concerned glances, as if he were fragile and likely to shatter into her arms at any given second.

Armin wanted to ask where the split lip had come from, but something about Mikasa’s expression- she knew, he was sure of it- said no. He wasn’t sure why he continued to be a slave to her facial expressions; perhaps he was simply too weak-willed. Eren had pretended to not see him staring at it, but had gotten progressively angrier as the day progressed, until the bell rang at the end of the day and Eren picked up his bag angrily, storming out of the classroom without a word to anyone.

Yet again, his questions about Eren were suppressed. He was never to know what Mikasa was thinking, what the sibling’s individual intentions of getting to know Armin were, whether Eren had gotten beaten up whilst staying out late, why he stayed out late, or who “Grisha” was.

It was Thursday lunchtime when Eren proposed getting drunk.

“W-W-What?” Armin spluttered, and it scared him how Eren looked so deadly serious. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Eren’s social anxiety lessens when he’s drunk.”

“What… so…” Armin wasn’t sure if he was right, but Eren looked expectant, so he went with his premonitions, “You can speak?”

Eren nodded, before cocking his head to the side thoughtfully and pulled a face, which upset his lip and he cursed under his breath with an English word Armin didn’t know. What he read from that, other than the fact his lip hurt, was that it was the case most of the time. Panic rose in his chest as he wondered what reflection it would be on him if Eren still couldn’t talk in his presence even when intoxicated, before he told himself that that kind of thinking was stupid. It held no reflection on him whatsoever: Eren’s mutism was about him, not Armin. 

“Is that the only reason?” Mikasa asked, her grey eyes flashing dangerously at Armin. 

Eren showed her his notepad, and Armin only caught what it said upside-down when he put it back on the table. _You’re not invited._

“Yes I am, Eren. Where do you intend to go? It’s too cold to hang about outside,” Mikasa challenged.

_Armin’s._

“A-Ah…!” Armin was so surprised, he wasn’t really sure how to react. He wasn’t sure about having two people he didn’t know too well in his bedroom, which was sort of bland in a way that used to creep Jean out. Eren and Mikasa both looked at him. Eren was startled, while Mikasa evidently had forgotten Armins was even there.

“Clearly not,” Mikasa said, not taking her eyes of the blond. 

“N-No, I mean- we could, I’d have to check what my mum’s doing though. Um… I guess, uh, she didn’t like Jean much, so… But… Um… If she’s out…” 

Eren butted in. _No one likes Jean much._

“Christa seems to,” Mikasa pointed out, and Eren didn’t even try and hide the fact that he was looking over at Jean, Christa and Marco on the next table, leaning backwards and somehow not choking as he chewed a mouthful of apple. 

“Um… Actually, Christa’s using him for his maths notes. Ymir needs them.”

Eren flipped back up so fast that Armin was surprised his neck didn’t snap off. He looked incredulous as he swallowed his mouthful, as if Armin’s knowledge about his classmates was in some way esoteric to Eren’s field of knowledge. Come to think of it, Armin pondered, the pair were new to the school, so it probably was construed as such. 

_How do you know that??_

Armin shrugged. “Overheard them?” 

_Which one’s Ymir?_

Armin was unsure as to why Eren was so interested in this information, but then perhaps it wasn’t the information itself Eren was interested in; he seemed to be watching Armin very closely, even going so far as to lean over the table slightly as Armin said, “Uh… Tall, freckles, never really in lessons…”

“Hi Jean,” Mikasa commented, and Armin was confused, not only by the civil way Mikasa noticed Jean first, but by his sudden arrival at their table. He looked sheepish for a moment, gazing down at Mikasa from the corner of his eye, as if afraid to look at her, but by the time he’d run his fingers through his hair, Eren was glaring at him.

“Wow, OK Eren, I was just coming to say sorry about yesterday… and Friday. I was out of line… I mean, I get now that you’re… uh… yeah, but, I guess even if I didn’t know, I kind of acted like a dick. Yeah.”

It was an interesting development, Armin thought. He’d thought Jean had paid no attention to him when he’d mentioned apologising to Eren, but here he was, briefly catching Armin’s eye, as if looking for approval. Wasn’t he angry with him for forsaking him for the one boy he hated? Did he still hate Eren? 

He supposed he had to take it in context. It wasn’t that he was loath to admit that Jean might be trying to be a nice person, but he slowly became aware that Christa and Marco had been watching attentively from the next table: which could of course indicate that he’d told them before he came over to Eren, but also suggested he was doing it for their benefit. Or Armin’s.

He knew Eren’s reactions to social situations weren’t always going to be typical, or even close, but even Armin was taken aback by the expression on Eren’s face. He expected maybe Eren’s to shrug it off, or reject it with the special fiery scowl he reserved exclusively for Jean, but this wasn’t the case. He looked lost, hurt, panicked, with an embarrassingly red blush rising on his dark skin. It was only then that Armin noticed Mikasa had hold of his pen, refusing to give it to him, even as he looked between her and Jean. His fingers were tight over the spine of his notebook.

“If you have something to say, say it,” she told him, looking straight in his eyes, and Armin had a sudden urge to yell at her for the whole canteen to see. It was horrible to see the dawn of realisation spread across his face. He opened his mouth to protest, before seemingly becoming overwhelmed by his own sense of self and the pressure of those around him now watching his every move, and it was then that Armin understood what it meant to Eren to be mute. It was no longer just a minor inconvenience to him, or an aspect of his character easily forgotten when thinking about his effervescent personality, but a harsh, biting reality, crushing his spirit. 

“It’s OK… I mean, you don’t need to-” Jean tried, but he was cut off by Mikasa’s glare. It was unjust, Armin thought, Mikasa treating him this way. 

The outcome was the same as always: Eren left, the same whirlwind of anger, but this time horribly hurt. 

Armin went after him. He wasn’t sure what kind of help he’d be, given that Eren had tossed his notebook down on the table as he walked out (already being without his pen, and like Armin, the rest of his stuff was in his locker), but Armin had no intentions of staying with Jean and Mikasa: he was fed-up with both of them, Mikasa to a larger and stronger degree. 

Eren walked fast. In fact, he was almost running- leaving the canteen and slipping down by the kitchens where they were obscured from everyone else by obnoxiously large wheely bins. It took him a while for him to slow down, heading towards the deliveries entrance of the school, which was when Armin caught up with him. 

“Eren, wait!”

Armin didn’t think Eren had noticed him being there before he called out. He rounded on Armin, and for a moment, it was as if he was going to shout. He didn’t. The silence was worse: Armin could just see him upset and frustrated, with no way of expressing it to anyone. 

People saw Eren as angry because he didn’t know how to deal with things. He couldn’t always communicate exactly what he wanted to, held back around people he didn’t know and by his general lack of speech. 

“I…I… You don’t have to say anything, I just wanted to…”

Armin saw Eren as angry because, suddenly, that’s exactly what he was. He almost seemed possessed, and Armin didn’t know what hit him when the taller boy walked up to him and rammed him furiously into the wall. Armin squeaked, but Eren said nothing. His eyes were brimming with little remorse, and Armin braced himself for a beating. 

Armin liked Eren because no matter how angry or hurt he was, he still had a sense of good about him. His lack of self-control meant it was easy to become a monster, abusing his fellow students- and yet, here he was, stopping himself, even if Armin thought he was justified enough to want to hit him. Maybe that was why he hurt himself: as punishment for all the things he almost did, or as a manifestation of the internal pain he felt, or just a coping mechanism: Armin wasn’t sure. Either way, it was clear that Eren had spent enough time on the other side of the coin to see a reflection of himself in Armin when he shut his eyes and braced for Eren to hit him: or at least, that’s what Armin gathered from the boy with the split lip who’d just been humiliated in front of half a canteen of people, who was now, much to Armin’s surprise, crying.

Eren crying was weird, there were no two ways about it. It was a good reminder, Armin supposed, that everyone was human, and everyone cried sometimes. It was just strange in the situation though, having a boy who had only just looked like wrath incarnate, clutching Armin’s shirt as he sobbed. 

It was only natural that Armin ended up crying too. He’d already been on the verge of doing so when Eren had turned on him, because- arrogant though it may be to assume he knew how Eren felt- Armin had felt hurt watching Mikasa embarrass him the way she did. 

“I-I’m sorry… I know I don’t understand…”

Eren looked up at him then. He was stretching Armin’s shirt by clinging on to it like that, but that wasn’t what Armin was looking at: as ever, he was drawn to Eren’s eyes. They were wet now, and his eyelashes were sticking together. Armin wanted to rub his tears away but he couldn’t seem to move- his breath was hitched in his throat, and any slight movement he’d make would probably startle Eren, judging by how intensely he was now watching him. 

Eren fidgeted. They were really close, no more than a foot between their faces. He unclenched his hand slightly, as if he was going to move away. Clenched it again. He was indecisive. Why? They’d not been this close before, yet Eren wasn’t as visibly uncomfortable as he had been when surrounded by people. 

It was a small kiss to start, like testing the water. Or at least, he supposed that was Eren’s thinking- Armin didn’t reckon he’d realised what had just happened before their lips crashed awkwardly together once more, and his head exploded with guilt, confusion and the inexorable bliss that Eren Jaeger was kissing him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My favourite thing about Isayama's writing is his balanced writing of characters- the fact they're all in a moral grey area, that they have motivations and aims that affect what they do, whether clear to an audience or not (except Grisha, ain't nobody knows what he was thinking but hey). That's kind of what I'm trying to go for, so maybe try to wait to hear character's reasoning before y'all judge them. (I'm mostly talking Mikasa, because I love her and she can be used a bit like a spare piece in fics and stuff, but she's really important here! A suivre...)


	9. Explain

Sometimes Armin felt life was taking him for a ride. People told him sometimes that he needed to be more assertive, but then what was assertiveness when it seemed nothing was in his control? He wasn’t sure how he felt about standing on the doorstep of a guy he used to fancy carrying a plastic bag of drinks.

The drinks, at least, were mostly non-alcoholic.

He wasn’t even sure it was Jean’s idea, but it was Jean who had proposed them getting drunk at his house, given that his parents were apparently away for the weekend. In fact, his text was what had pulled him and Eren apart on the Thursday behind the school canteen, as neither of them could ignore it when Armin’s phone buzzed in his pocket no fewer than six times.

**Is Eren OK?**

**Mikasa seems upset, what should I say???**

**Not sure if I love you or hate you for leaving her with me**

**Holy SHIT Mikasa just gave me her number**

**Apparently you guys are coming to mine to get pissed on Fri?**

**I feel we should place a bet on who scores first (love interest wise)**

Eren’s tears had left his burning face wet, and Armin wondered his he looked the same way as Eren did, once he could look at him beneath his fringe under the guise of reading Jean’s extensive texts: his lips looked flushed and ever so slightly fuller than normal, and he was breathing deeper.

In part, he was thankful to Jean for somehow having worked things out with Mikasa, as when the four met up later, nothing was mentioned, and Eren even gave Jean a watery smile. However, Armin would continue to resent him until the end of time for disturbing him and Eren before anything real started. 

“What is it?” Eren had eventually managed to ask in a whisper, avoiding Armin’s eye contact and leaning over to catch a glimpse of his phone screen. Armin gave him the gist of all but the most recent text, to which he didn’t reply, instead resorting to a confused frown.

Then again, Armin thought, he’d never properly gotten either side of the story, as he’d not had a chance to talk alone with Mikasa, Jean, or Eren (with a notepad this time) since Thursday’s incident. They’d all sort of stuck together, Jean disappearing on Friday morning for a while before silently appearing and following the trio round later.

It felt contrived, the normality of it. Then again, Armin didn’t really have the right to say, as he technically wasn’t involved. It was between Eren, Jean and Mikasa, all of whom seemed to have become oddly docile. The remainder of Thursday and Friday was like the calm before the storm- or, Armin had thought so, even before he’d received a text from Jean during Physics demanding him to come round half an hour earlier than everyone else.

He supposed it was pretty good fortune that Jean had suddenly decided to be so amicable with Eren, as Jean’s lower-middle class family home seemed a better option to Armin’s tiny bedroom with his mother next door, or Eren and Mikasa’s ambiguous-sounding East German household, whatever that implied. It was a while since Armin had come to Jean’s, and standing on his doorstep in the rain reminded him a lot of his first year in Gymnasium, when everyone seemed a lot nicer and life a lot simpler. Maybe he was romanticising it with age though.

“So you got my message then?” Jean looked down at him, and Armin couldn’t snap out of his daze quick enough to let loose a dry comment about being left waiting on the doorstep. Jean cleared his throat. “Don’t just stand there.”

The inside of the house was the same as Armin remembered it, though for some reason he was expecting it to have changed somehow. Jean’s room was different, but only in regards to his age: there were fewer posters on the walls and the drawings on his desk were of a better quality (no more Ninja Turtles, Armin would note wryly when he leafed through them later), but otherwise, the bed and the layout of the room were still identical to that of their earlier years of friendship.

“What’s in the bag?”

“Coke and vodka,” Armin replied. That was a lie. Jean wouldn’t know this, of course, as there was indeed a bottle of cola and a bottle of vodka in the bag, only Armin had heavily diluted the vodka with water until the alcohol was almost tasteless. He’d decided on Thursday evening that he wasn’t going to drink. Strange though it sounded (hence being why he didn’t intend to let on to Jean), he wanted to stay sober in order to optimise his time with a drunk Eren: and his aims were information based more than anything. 

Armin had forgotten how he tended to regress into his own head at the worst of times, and felt the weight of the thick silence as he realised Jean was watching him muse.

“Christa told me you used to fancy me.”

“W-What?” Armin said, and he couldn’t help but blush, giving his game away. “I-Is that what you wanted to talk about?” It seemed a strange topic of conversation for a boy who seemed to be trying, in some strange way, to accept Armin’s new love interest after essentially harassing him for the past week and a half.

“No, but apparently everyone knew except me.”

“You would have noticed if you weren’t so self-obsessed,” Armin spat, and instantly regretted it, putting his hands over his mouth. It stressed him that Jean didn’t look too bothered. In fact, he made a non-committal hand gesture, like a flick, to illustrate this point more clearly than merely his apathetic facial expression and raised eyebrows.

“Is that why you went off me?” It sounded like a genuine question.

“N-No… Well… I don’t know, not really. I mean, we just kind of grew apart, you hung out with Marco more, I decided you really weren’t helping with the whole bullying thing and… Well… Why are you asking me now?”

“Closure?”

“I-Is this why you apologised to Eren, or was that about Mikasa?” 

“…I just hate myself sometimes. I was a dick to Eren, even if I know he hates me, but… Yeah, it was part of it. Pleasing you and Mikasa- though I’m not sure how well it went, considering…” He kicked off his shoes, one of them hitting his waste paper basket and knocking it over, a school newsletter and an empty bottle of water spilling out. “That wasn’t even what I wanted to talk about. How much does Mikasa drink?”

“Um…” Armin didn’t know. “Not much, I don’t think. Or at least, that’s what I’d guess, she has to watch Eren so… Uh… Isn’t that a bit creepy to ask?”

“Shut up, I know you’re thinking the same thing about Eren,” Jean shot back.

“I don’t need to worry about how much Eren drinks.”

“What?”

“Eren drinks to bypass his social anxiety,” Armin frowned.

“Y’mean mutism.”

“Both.”

“Yeah, Mikasa said. People think you’re innocent as fuck but you’re really evil, aren’t you?” He stared at Armin for a while, as if trying to drink in every detail of his face, zealously sketching him in his mind. When he continued, his voice was quieter, as if Armin’s features had been a rich source of contemplation, “But I guess it works for me, uh… You and Eren, me and Mikasa.”

Armin blushed at Jean’s mention of him and Eren as a couple, but thankfully, Jean seemed more interested in how he would seduce Mikasa than the bashful boy standing in front of him. 

Perhaps Jean’s advances would be good for all of them. After all, Armin theorised, if Mikasa paid more attention to Jean and less towards Eren, then perhaps their relationship would become healthier than the obsessive, one-sided, almost non-communicative one they had currently. And then there was the fact that as much as Armin was still mad at Mikasa, he got the feeling she was simply frustrated (in her own way), and that a distraction would be beneficial to her as well as Eren’s wellbeing. 

Plus, Jean and Armin both got the person they wanted.

It wouldn’t work out, Armin thought. Things that looked like they took straightforward actions to achieve more often than not were part of a larger tangle. Not to mention, the whole evening was based around Eren’s choice mode of what was, when it came down to it, self-destruction.

Mikasa had been what Jean really wanted to talk about, as well as mentioning that Marco and whoever else he fancied bringing was going to “swing by” later, apparently when Eren was drunk enough to not notice how crowded Jean’s front room had become. The fact that he had considered this was surprising to Armin in that Jean somehow understood Eren’s disposition in such situations to a large enough degree to be able to take a genuinely helpful measure to evade making him feel uncomfortable (or another panic attack); though it also worried him, in that Jean somehow knew Eren was going to get drunk. Indeed, Eren had made his aim clear, but Armin had never started an evening knowing that people were intending to get drunk: just ones where there happened to be drinks, or when someone spiked the punch at Jean’s 15th. It made him nervous.

Eren had already taken something by the time they arrived on Jean’s doorstep, sodden from the worsening rain but with slightly glazed eyes and an ambiguous smile when he spotted Armin behind Jean. His lip had gone an interesting shade of indigo, with hints of red from where the scab had split.

“Jaeger, you need to get that shit looked at. It’s ugly even compared to your face,” Jean remarked, and the two fingers Eren held up to him were enough to summarise how much he’d drunk to Jean and Armin. After that, Jean’s gaze slipped to Mikasa, and Armin gulped, realising that whatever happened that night would be etched into his memory for a long time to come.


	10. Discuss

For a while, there was a heavy silence in Jean’s front room. It felt set in, as if it had fixed itself to the carpet and permeated the walls, saturating the air they breathed until it suffocated Jean and he got up, hand running back through his hair. 

“You guys want a drink?” Jean asked, and Eren handed him a plastic bag that he’d seemingly forgotten he had twisted tightly round his hand. It left a little white mark for a moment on his skin once Jean had taken it off him, but the sullen expression and lifeless eyes didn’t seem to notice.

“Mikasa?”

“I’m fine.” 

“Um, Armin bought cola if you’re not wanting to drink, it’s cool,” Jean said, and Armin gritted his teeth.

“Oh,” she said, and her voice momentarily sounded sing-song, like a fresh breeze. “Thanks.” 

“I’ll help,” Armin stated, and he could see Jean looking surprised at the confidence in his voice out of the corner of his eye. Evidently, he wasn’t interested in making a scene, at least not in front of Mikasa. Armin had anticipated that. Jean was right, he was quite corrupt sometimes, and he couldn’t say he was proud of his ability to manipulate. If only said ability was even remotely on a par to Mikasa’s, he might be able to work out what she was thinking. Something had clearly gone on, he’d decided, and it was the source of the uncomfortable atmosphere: and Jean agreed.

“What’s with them?” he mouthed as soon as they were out of sight in the kitchen. Armin helped himself to Jean’s cupboard, pulling out four glasses, wondering how to answer. “Or just Eren,” Jean muttered, and Armin pressed his finger against his lips. “Do you think they had a fight? He upset Mikasa?”

“Maybe it’s still left over anger from the other day,” Armin whispered, hating himself for engaging with Jean. A week ago, he would probably have quietly declined if Jean asked if Armin would sit with him and Marco in the canteen, and now he felt like he was conspiring against two people he ultimately cared for. Armin feared his relationship with Jean may not be as simple as he thought, as there was something about the way Jean was leaning on the counter towards him that brought back something repressed in the depths of his mind. He was distracted, however, by remembering his aim in following Jean to the kitchen. “You’re not spiking her drink.”

“Who said I was spiking hers?” Jean muttered, and Armin blinked. He felt stupid for not having worked Jean’s motivations into his prospective actions more easily. 

There was a murmuring next door.

Jean avoided his gaze, poking his nose into the plastic bag Eren had handed him. “Beer. French beer. I can deal with that. You want one?” 

Armin shook his head. He’d left his bag next to the sofa, in what he realised was a happy accident: he and Mikasa could see nothing was put in her drink, while Armin could pour his heavily diluted vodka into his while Eren was watching.

Jean pulled out two cans, sliding two glasses along the side. He opened and poured both cans at the same time, filling them only halfway. While he let the froth settle, he extracted his own bottle of vodka from the cupboard- a more expensive brand than Armin’s, he noticed- and poured a very liberal amount into one of the glasses, before topping them both up with the remaining beer, swigging the leftovers from the one can. Armin’s heart was in his throat, and he felt a burn of shame as he realised he was more scared for Eren noticing the taste of the vodka (there must have been about four or five shots worth in the glass) than the lack of morality in spiking his drink. 

It was Armin’s turn to follow Jean back into where the siblings were sat, and he handed Eren’s glass confidently to him. Eren nodded in thanks, again looking towards Armin, but Armin avoided his gaze, overcome with guilt.

It was an anti-climax to see Eren take a small swig and hand his notebook to Jean as he did so, before placing the glass between his knees. 

Armin leant over to read. He could feel Mikasa watching them carefully, which made Armin more nervous, especially once he saw that Eren had actually scrawled a good paragraph of writing, at the top of a fresh sheet of paper.

_I’m sorry too about the other day, I didn’t mean to embarrass you in the canteen and we had a misunderstanding about me and Marco. You still look like a horse though. Mikasa knows I’m writing that apology. Here’s what she can’t see me writing: I know you like her. Swap seats with me and get her off my back, OK?_

“Uh, thanks, Eren,” he smiled, and Armin cringed as he stood up immediately. Before Eren could move, he handed the notebook back, continuing, “Gimme a minute, I think we’ve got snacks in the kitchen somewhere.” He then disappeared, and Eren made his move across from the one double sofa to the other, tripping slightly as he manoeuvred round the coffee table, and colliding with Armin’s knee.

“Shit,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

It was only when they met each other’s gaze a moment later that Eren’s face lit up in realisation, and he looked pleased with himself. It was as if he were treating the verbally communicative side of himself differently to his normal self, like he considered them two different entities. A doubling, almost, as if his life was a Gothic fiction, so spun with Freudian theories that he’d forgotten which way was up and what was his repressed half. Armin didn’t know what the expression on his own face was, but it can’t have been entirely impassive, as it was the first time Eren had addressed him verbally, without shouting or whispering.

The moment passed, however, and he became aware of Mikasa still glaring at him, so far having said less than her mute brother. What had been said? Did she know about him and Eren? Should she?

Armin remembered the Diet Coke at his feet, and was glad to have an opportunity to break Mikasa’s gaze by pouring out two glasses. Jean re-entered the room, carrying a large bag of chilli-flavoured crisps, which he threw directly at Eren’s face.

“Jumping in my grave, twat.”

“H-Hey, mind,” Armin yelped, as Eren lifted himself onto one knee and threw them violently back. Jean ducked, and it was surprising to hear Jean snorting as if amused, with only a little hint of derision. 

“You forget,” Armin said, adding the fake vodka to his drink, “That Eren hit you pretty squarely with his shoe the other day.” Jean sat down next to Mikasa, looking casual if not for the fact that he seemed to check her approval first with a quick look to check she wasn’t refusing his sitting next to her.

“Don’t fucking remind me,” he spat, but it seemed in good humour, so Armin felt inclined to relax a little. He sensed the tension had been eased. Mikasa looked less threatening tucking herself as far away from Jean as possible, clutching a lukewarm Coke; Eren looked more comfortable sat away from her, sitting on an angle towards Armin with his legs crossed in a way that purposely invaded Armin’s personal space, whilst meaning he was directed towards the conversation between Jean and Eren rather than Mikasa (who was now sat opposite him). Jean was offering round the crisps. 

Armin’s cola was a bit too diluted now, like it had had ice in it at one point. He didn’t mind. He could see Eren watching him drink, and wondered for a moment if staying sober was a good idea. If Jean could charm Mikasa (much though he doubted it), they could continue where they left off on Thursday, and this time far more comfortable.

Eren was in the habit of breaking crisps apart with his fingers before eating them, one piece after the other. It created crumbs down his jumper, which he didn’t seem too bothered about brushing away.

It was forty-five minutes and a whole pint glass later when Eren became able to speak. Jean and Armin had been discussing school, it almost feeling like old times, while Eren and Mikasa sat quietly, Eren throwing down a comment or two on his notepad when he felt like it. He didn’t announce it as such. In fact, if it hadn’t have been for Jean’s look of disbelief, or the self-satisfied and tipsy-sounding giggle Eren gave right after he spoke, Armin might not have noticed how out of the ordinary it was.

“I heard that the psychology teacher with the glasses fancies Herr Ackerman.”

“T-The fuck did you hear that?” Jean said after a moment of silence, and Armin could have sworn he saw the hint of a blush creep up his cheeks. 

“Uhh…” He wiggled his toes as he thought, “One of the teachers. I don’t know their names yet.” He had a slight slur between his words when rounding of the sentence, but Armin might have been the only one to notice.

“Does that happen a lot? I mean, do you overhear stuff lots?”

Armin wasn’t sure where Jean was heading with his line of questioning, but Eren was frowning.

“What’s it to you?” 

“I just thought, you must, given that you’re not what we’d call loud, if…”

“Jean,” Armin gave him a warning glance. 

“What?” Jean cried, immediately on the defence. He was looking between Armin and Eren with an expression of indignation, and Armin feared this meant he had yet to finish his point. “I’m not trying to be rude, y’know, maybe I just want to understand shit better. I mean, why only yell at me?”

“Because you’re a dickhead,” Armin muttered, and Eren snorted, meanwhile changing his position again so he really was intimately close to Armin, leaning on his arm. Armin was interested to see the reactions of the other two would pan out if he got any closer- as Jean knew Armin liked Eren but wasn’t aware it was requited, while he supposed Mikasa was blind to Jean’s knowledge of it and Eren’s feelings. 

Armin looked down at the crop of chocolate hair on his left side, messy on one side from where it splayed over the sleeve of his jumper. He could feel the warmth of Eren’s skin from beneath the material. 

“I don’t know,” he said pensively, voice free from aggression again. It was only then that Armin notice Eren had, somewhere along the lines, drained his glass: not that it meant much, as he had no idea how much the boy had had to drink. “It’s selective mutism, I think, right Mikasa? So, it’s, uh, selective. Maybe your face just annoys me.”

“What do you mean, “I think”? Besides the fact that you’ve never had brain activity in your life, isn’t that the sort of thing you’re sure about? A diagnosis?”

“Why does it matter?” The volume of Eren’s voice escalated over the course of the short statement, and Armin felt him tense.

“Why do you always avoid the question?” Jean yelled.

“He’s never been formally diagnosed with anything,” Mikasa said, and Jean whipped his head around to look at her. Armin had a funny feeling he’d forgotten she was there.

“Shut up Mikasa,” Eren snapped, his tone horribly bitter.

“Eren, that’s fucking stupid, you can get help for this shit you know. And don’t talk to Mikasa like that.”

“I’ll talk to Mikasa how I want, horseface.”

“You’re avoi-” 

“W-Wait, Eren, he didn’t mean it in a bad way,” Armin chipped in, and his heart skipped a beat as Eren looked up from him below, blinking. The effect was lessened when he was bordering the other side of tipsy and he could hold eye contact less than usual, but all the same, Armin found himself suddenly reminded of why he was so utterly smitten with this boy (aggro aside).

“I meant, like, you can get help,” Jean muttered. Armin could no longer tell if he was trying to be genuine or throw a backhanded insult, but he supposed whatever the intentions, riling Eren up the wrong way was just far too easy. Had it not have been for the seriousness of the situation, and the way Eren momentarily looked ready to start a fight over Jean’s coffee table, Armin might have had an opportunity to be thankful to Jean for providing Eren with an outlet for his anger. He lacked many resources, after all, but having seen the frustration in his eyes being unable to express his emotions in any other way than forcing Armin against a wall and crying into his shirt, Armin found having someone on which to force his pent up anger at his situation, loath as Eren was to admit it to himself, was somewhat beneficial.

“I don’t need help,” he spat, “Don’t treat me as if I need fixing, you should take a good look in the mirror.”

Jean looked livid now Eren had gone so far as to lean forward while he spoke, spewing his words with venom. His brow had hardened into an unmovable crease as he went to retort, but Mikasa- the one girl who understood Eren more than anyone-got there first.

“Eren, that’s enough!” She was stood up, and although her words lacked the same unrelenting force as Eren’s or Jean’s, her presence was commanding. Eren wasn’t about to protest against this thunderstorm of a girl has she looked down at him from what seemed like miles away, brushing her hair from her eyes. “You do need help! You need alcohol in your system to us to even have this conversation! You can’t stand up for yourself when it matters the most! You got us kicked out of school! You sit there and cut yourself and there’s so much…” she was sobbing now, “So much blood, but you keep going, like it’s…!” 

Armin hated her for not being able to finish the sentence, even if it would have ruined Jean’s iron composure. He hated her. She was an embodiment of pain, tears streaming down her face, yet Eren didn’t seem to be swayed by it. He was still angry. Wasn’t it supposed to be her job to make him understand?

“And when I tell you I want to stay by your side, you...”

Armin looked at Eren’s wrists. 

He stood up then too. They were both exactly the same height, and there was a crackle in the air as their eyes met. Eren leant forward.

“And you’re always by my side, are you, Mikasa?”

It was the amount of hurt that crossed her face that told Armin Eren was talking about something in particular. It seemed a strange thing for Eren to say, after all: he had spent so much time freezing her out, yet when he’s stood in front of Jean and Armin, blind with rage and shaking in his efforts to restrain his intoxicated body, he had used her obsessive nature against her?

Yet then, there was no denying it that her fixation with protecting Eren was her weak point, or otherwise Eren wouldn’t have exploited it as he did. There was no way Mikasa could look more torn apart than she did in that moment. She’s gone beyond anger and despair, and almost looked as if she’d given up entirely, tears streaming slowly from her dull grey eyes and dripping one by one from the point of her chin.

Armin wanted to disappear.

The situation, as it was, was only diffused once Eren had done what he always did and left by himself, stepping out into the rain and shutting the door, not with a slam, but a melancholic little _click_. As Mikasa sat down, Armin got his feet, and Jean blinked at him incredulously.

“Is now the time to go running after him?” he said, and he spoke through gritted teeth, as if he begrudged everything in the waking world. 

It was a lot of effort to answer. Many things had been a lot of effort for a while now, including getting out of bed each and every single morning, but Armin didn’t suppose anyone noticed he felt that way. The arrival of the puzzle of Mikasa and Eren hadn’t stopped this, but it had indeed distracted him. He didn’t notice the ebbing of his ennui thanks to this muse: a face to think about whilst staring at his own weary figure in the bathroom mirror before dawn, a distraction and a sense of familiarity searched out in a classroom. Answering Jean bought upon him, once again, a heavy reminder of this drowning feeling, and he suddenly felt like curling up and dying.

“Does he strike you as the sort of person people run after a lot?”

His point didn’t come out sounding the way he wanted, and as he sauntered from the room, his mind provided him with an echo, as well as a number of bland retorts put into the mouth of Jean by his conscience. 

He’d had enough anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wait wasn't I supposed to be writing a love story
> 
> Dysfunctional relationships and conflicted characters are my thing tbh


	11. Analyse

It was a stiff realisation, as Armin quitted the front room, that going after Eren meant he would have to face him after what Mikasa had just blurted out. It was selfish to want to avoid this confrontation, especially as Eren’s current trajectory, both long and short-term, were bound to tragedy to Faustian proportions. And yet, Armin, even with so little alcohol in his bloodstream, quickly justified the two beers he took with him as a relief, telling himself that what Eren needed was a break, not a lecture.

Eren, too, chose the more amicable but more cowardly option of the emotions that flitted across his face when he saw the blonde boy step out into the rain. He chose what he knew well: silence.

Armin often sat on his bed and said and did nothing. He would never close his eyes, no matter how much the beat of the day put a strain on them and tugged them down in a dull ache, no matter how much the magnolia of his walls stared back at him. It wasn’t as if he had nothing to do; the Abitur had strains of its own, and there was always something better he could have been doing that tucking himself beneath his blood-stained bedcover and rubbing his knees. Yet, it was none of this that occurred to Armin as he sat down by Eren and handed him one of the beers: it was the silence that seemed to fill his ears and leave him brimming in melancholy and numbing isolation, despite the fact that there was traffic outside. It felt as if he were having some sort of trip; yet it was bland, incredibly bland. 

Eren may have been beside him then, but there were none of the sparks of the previous day. Armin would have barely noticed him, had it not have been for Mikasa’s words ringing in his ears. Part of him wanted Eren to be mad, if only to distract them both from the ceaseless rainfall and deafening silence, but mostly he just wanted the dead weight of something he couldn’t quite define to be lifted off his chest, so he could do what he went out there to do.

Eren looked up at the sky, and Armin followed his gaze, trying not to notice him fiddling indecisively with the ring-pull of the beer. There might have been a storm coming, but then Armin wasn’t sure if it was windy enough. He wished he’d looked at the weather before he’d come to Jean’s. He wished he’d bought his jacket outside with him, before leaving so abruptly. He wished Eren would be the one to start the conversation. He wouldn’t, he knew, but he still wished it anyway.

It was only once five minutes had passed, and Eren had opened his mouth a few times as if to speak, but never got to the point of looking Armin in the eye, that Armin decided that he was being selfish. He also suspected Eren wasn’t as drunk as he had seemed earlier. Either that, or the freezing sheets of rain that had plastered his hair against his head and made his clothes look heavier on his awkward limbs had sobered him up a bit.

“You know,” he began softly, once he’d planned carefully what to say, “When Germany was reunified, they gave all the East Germans who moved to West Germany 100 Deutchmarks as what they called "welcome money". A-And they altered the exchange rate of East German Marks to Deutchmarks in favour of the East Germans: I mean, I think it was supposed to be worth 1 Deutchmark to 2 East German Marks, but they… They set it at 1:1.”

Eren turned to look at him. His expression was like a French copy of Camus’ “L’etranger”: even if Armin could have read it, he wasn’t sure he would have wanted to.

“Uh,” Armin faltered, “I’m not sure what I meant by that. Other than, I guess… uh… It doesn’t matter how long it’s been, there’s always a way out.”

The noise of Eren opening the beer was sharp in Armin’s ears. He took a swig and wiped his face on his sleeve, and Armin was unsure where the rainwater stopped and the fleck of alcoholic froth on his jumper began.

“I have my own story,” he said, after a few minutes. Armin could see him struggling to get the words out, and it hurt: he wanted the tense atmosphere to go away and for Eren to achieve what he’d been considering the day before through drinking, no matter how blindly idealistic and potentially harmful. “In Buchenwald, above the door, it says “to each what they are due” in iron. The lettering’s clean and minim’listic, because it was designed by one of the camp’s inmates, called Franz Ehrlich- a Communist. He studied art at the Bauhaus.” Eren glanced at Armin, as if to check if he was listening. “Which is obviously part of the art the Nazis considered “degenerate”, because it was left-wing and stuff. So on the surface, this sign is a giant “fuck you” to the sick bastards who commissioned that design… Except it isn’t- Franz Ehrlich got out in 1939 or someth’ng, and then went on to work ‘nder the Nazis and the Soviets in East Germ’ny, and it was discovered that he was a massive informant for the Stasi. I know exactly what that means: it means the human race is trash, we’re weak and abusive of power at the same time and we’ll do anyth’ng to protect ‘rselves.”

It took Armin by surprise to see Eren wasn’t angry, because he certainly sounded it, the way he spat his words into the rain-washed dusk as if they tasted vile. Instead, he looked more despondent. 

“Would it have been any better if he’d have died in that camp?” Armin asked. Eren shrugged, so he continued, “You use Ehrlich as your source of disquiet, yet there were thousands like him, some with the power to stop what was going on. Sure, he sold out his beliefs- except did he? M-Maybe it’s better to listen to other people sometimes. Not the Nazis, but his art did more good outside of Buchenwald than it did in.”

He shuffled over to Eren, heart pounding, pushing his fringe out from his eye. 

“Eren, Mikasa, she-”

“I don’t want to hear it,” he snapped, and suddenly, he was livid. Armin could see that fire in his eyes, and everything that remained repressed and silent came pouring out. He ripped up his left sleeve, and Armin saw the marks- there were fresh ones- criss-crossing his dark skin, as if counting for something. “Mikasa has no right to tell me what I can and can’t do. T-This… This makes me feel powerful. Because it’s not someone else, it’s me, I’m in control, and when I draw blood I’m 50 fucking feet high and what you or Jean or Mikasa thinks doesn’t m’tter anymore. And yeah, ’t’s selfish. I’m fucking Franz Ehrlich. A bad person, selfish, wh’tever.”

“Eren, please,” Armin begged. He was caught between the way Eren was glaring at him and the horrific slices up his arm, countless times, like a kind of obsession. Armin could even see the scars beneath, where the skin had puckered and gone hard, yet had been cut again and again and again like a never-ending torture, an eternal cycle of pain. 

This is where Mikasa normally stepped in, Armin thought. What made her think Eren needed Armin? Regardless of whatever strange relationship they held, Mikasa was a balm to Eren’s anger. How had she done it?

It was only then that Armin understood where the grey dullness in Mikasa’s eyes had come from, as he scolded himself internally. Eren’s face was one of someone who craved to cause pain, probably to himself; but what of other people? Armin felt threatened by Eren, even though he knew his docile nature, and how he could whisper compliments in his ear and offer him dinner. Did he do that for Mikasa? Mikasa wasn’t a balm, she was a person. 

He momentarily regretted having left Mikasa inside on her own.

“What has Mikasa done to deserve how you feel about her, Eren?”

“’S not what she’s done, ’s what she doesn’t do!” Eren yelled.

“She does everything for you!” Armin retorted, and he regretted it instantly. He was obviously missing something. He wanted to know what it was, yet he also didn’t. He was already treading dangerous territory.

He gave it a few seconds of silence, in which Eren seemed to visibly come down from his spate of anger, sinking into himself and giving off the air of someone who was confined in their own deep-rooted internal conflict. 

“I barely know you, Eren.”

“You know m’far better th’n I know you, and you’re the one that c’n talk.”

It took Armin a moment to compute what Eren was saying, and he swirled his reply round his mouth cautiously before letting it slip off his tongue as if it had been the natural course all along.

“Talking’s got nothing to do with it. Being mute doesn’t stop you being a person, you just have different needs.”

“Like alcohol, ummhmm,” he smiled, and Armin smiled back, dangerous a move though it was. Whatever he’d thought before about Eren sobering up was far from the truth; he was moving closer to Armin, and Armin could smell the bitter and pungent undertones of alcohol on his breath. No doubt Jean would have something to say about Eren being an such an utter lightweight at some point. 

Eren had his hand on Armin’s leg, trapping him where he was sat as rain-water dripped down their noses, and Eren closed in, showering him with kisses. Eren’s lips were warm against his pale, wet skin, and he moved like a clumsy snake: weaving and feeling his way across Armin’s skin, whilst knocking noses, and having moments where he seemed unsure of his next move, a catastrophic mix of alcohol and anxiety colliding in his brain that manifested itself in small, motionless pauses. 

His split-lip, still far from healed, scratched lightly at Armin’s skin.

“Eren, neither Mikasa nor I can save you from yourself.”

“It’s not a… bout that,” he growled between kisses, and Armin closed his eyes. His lashes stuck together then, making it seem labourious to have to open them again, so he let Eren do what he want. He was limp at the hands of a boy who hated himself, yet treated him like the most delicate of porcelain, handling him like a gift from King Frederick I of Prussia.

“Please don’t kill yourself.”

“I love you,” Eren whispered in reply.

“Are you listening?”

“’M sorry I am the way I am, and ’m sorry you h’d to hear M’kasa say all those th’ngs.” He was kissing his neck now, burying the side of his head into Armin’s damp jumper whilst draping his arm heavily around his neck, stroking his hair softly.

“They were all true, though? I won’t judge you based on those things, if that’s what you’re worried about Eren. But they’re still important to… this.” Armin’s heart was fluttering with the utter bliss of being so lovingly caressed by the one boy he’d had his eye on since he’d first seen him, but his ever-whirring brain was telling him not to use the “L” word to Eren yet. Eren was still trouble, even if he was intricate, unfinished, multi-faceted trouble.

“I’ll explain it soon, b’t ‘nly if you want me to,” Eren whispered, and it was when he slid his hands up Armin’s top that Armin’s eyes snapped open and he picked Eren of him. Eren looked somewhat betrayed, but his last words still hanging in the air meant he acquiesced after a moment, wiping the saliva from his mouth on his jeans. His eyes were glazed like iced buns, as if there were some sort of silvery film obscuring his vision. Armin wasn’t initially sure if it was from arousal or drunkenness, but the way Eren lurched forward a moment later was a hint that only went one way.

“E-E-Eren, are you going to throw up?” Armin spluttered, trying not to notice how Eren had grabbed his knee in an effort to stabilise himself as he got up to fetch help, forgetting about the tension between Eren and Mikasa as he tripped over his own feet in his haste to get inside.

Armin found it somewhat surreal to be stood on the doorstep of his childhood friend’s house, staring down at an unconscious teenager with one sleeve rolled up slumped against the chipped brickwork of the side of the house. And yet, when Armin rushed back out again, this time with a nonplussed Mikasa and Jean at his heel, there Eren was, completely cold in almost all senses of the word. 

“How much did he have to drink, Armin?” Jean asked, and Armin could only glare at him as Mikasa looked down at her adoptive brother with an unreadable expression spread across her face like a thin layer of butter.

“Only what you gave him, plus that can there,” Armin replied, admiring his ability to act as if he wasn’t annoyed and keep his voice free from resentment, “But anyway,” he said, bending down to pull down Eren’s sleeve, hiding his ceaseless tortures with a mere layer of damp polyester mix fabric, “Would alcohol have done that? Why wouldn’t he throw up first?”

“I don’t give a shit; he needs to go home,” Jean said, and Armin was surprised to look up to see a sense of maturity and grave seriousness had clouded his face. He wondered if Jean had caught sight of Eren’s wrists, or what Mikasa had said to him, if anything. Indeed, Jean was right, Armin thought: the evening had been almost doomed to fail when Jean’s plans layered on top of Eren’s perpetual fixation with a sort of self-destruct mode that had left him slumped to one side in the fading light of an autumnal dusk.

Mikasa jerked involuntarily, and fixed her eyes on Armin’s shoulder. “He can’t go home. Not yet.”

“Sorry Mikasa, but like fuck is he staying here, and there’s no way you should be keeping him outside. Looking, he’s fucking sopping, and we’re going to be the same if we keep standing out here staring at him.”

Mikasa looked at him- straight at him, without hesitation- and Jean faltered. 

“M-Mikasa, this…” he stammered, searching for the words to justify himself, “Your parents will just have to be mad with him this once. That split-lip doesn’t help, he needs a change of clothes and a warm bed… Armin?” Jean seemed desperate. It was obvious to Armin that he was caught between his own motives- there was practicality, Jean’s now blatant crush on Mikasa, and what Armin suspected was Jean’s acceptance of Eren: not only as someone his close friend loved but as he began to build a coherent picture around Eren, his anger, his mutism, and his mood swings, Armin questioned whether Jean hated Eren as much as he had. After all, he’d been proven wrong on so many counts since he’d accused him of being rude to Marco the first time they’d met. 

Armin blinked suddenly, overwhelmed by the realisation that he was being watched closely by Jean and Mikasa, as they waited patiently for his opinion. It was a strange feeling- he’d been so alone before Eren and Mikasa had come along, and now the pivot of a serious situation was resting on his opinion and his opinion alone.

“Mikasa, who’s Grisha?”

Armin hadn’t been expecting Mikasa to flinch. In fact, he hadn’t been expecting much of a reaction- the question had just come out, in an effort to better acquaint himself with the dynamics of the Jaeger household before making his decision- as after all, he could risk taking Eren home and getting in less trouble with his own mother, if it meant Eren avoided something worse. Except now Mikasa had reacted the way she had, suddenly, Armin was engaged. People didn’t flinch at a name unless there was a good reason.

Jean had seen it too. He wasn’t looking at Mikasa though; he was staring straight at Eren, taking in his unconscious state and strangely relaxed expression.

“Eren’s father,” she said finally, but the damage had been done. 

Shooting Armin a glance, she went to pick Eren up, flexing her muscles to throw his limp form over her shoulder.

“Wait, Mikasa,” Armin cried, not meaning to be so loud. Mikasa and Jean were both startled by his sudden outburst, but it was to his advantage, as it meant he could make his point, “Don’t put him over your shoulder, he’ll throw up.”

Mikasa glared at him as he took Eren’s left shoulder under his, before going to help, bringing Eren to his feet unsteadily. As Armin wavered under the sudden weight, Eren stirred, and Armin was so distracted by this that he barely noticed Jean coming and taking the weight off him. Jean was taller than Eren, yet having him rest on his shoulder seemed a lot more comfortable than having him rest on either Mikasa or Armin. Perhaps it was because of this that Eren lolled his head towards Jean (involuntarily or not, Armin supposed he would never know), leaving Mikasa in an auxiliary position, and Jean with more than he had bargained for. 

“I still don’t like Eren,” Jean insisted, and Armin couldn’t help but giggle, relieving some of the tension as he took in the sight of Eren with his head against Jean. He couldn’t have said Eren, had he have been conscious, would have been too pleased either. 

Despite Mikasa’s severe reluctance (at one point, Armin became aware that she was really begging him to take Eren back to his flat), they took Eren on the U-Bahn home. He slipped in and out of consciousness, never really long enough for anyone to make any sense out of his moans or protests. He fell asleep at one point, in Jean’s lap, as their carriage rocked lethargically back and forth.

Armin himself nearly fell asleep. His mind was worn out from its occupation with the subjects of Eren and Mikasa, and by the time the odd four were stood in the station down the road from Armin’s flat, Armin was only half-holding on to his theories about Eren and Mikasa’s home life. The rain had stopped now, but as Eren and Armin were wet through anyway, they didn’t notice much other than the fact that night had now fallen, and that the temperature was beginning to drop.

They seemed to slow as they made their way down the road, until they came to a stop on the corner of the street, opposite a set of traffic lights that blinked in the darkness. 

“Mikasa,” Jean said gently, “We don’t know where you live.”

“It’s fine,” Mikasa said, “It’s late, you guys should go. I can take him this last bit.”

“It’s not even 7,” Armin piped up, and Jean seemed to be on the same page, sharing with him a glance that seemed to express this.

“He’s not heavy,” Mikasa pointed out, and Jean shrugged, pushing Eren back into his vague consciousness as he did so. He seemed annoyed by the sudden noise and light from the streetlamp next to them, squinting and furrowing his brows in a way that made him look as if his eyes were just slits. His hair had dried slightly from the warmth of the U-Bahn, making it stick up from where he’d been leant against Jean.

“All the more reason for me to carry him,” Jean insisted, and Armin and Mikasa were both surprised as he pulled him from Mikasa’s grip and picked him up, princess-style. Armin was struck with sudden jealousy, and he wasn’t sure who for. He bit his lip, wondering if Jean had noticed Eren’s consciousness. Indeed, he hoped he would: it might highlight what on earth had come over Jean as to be so nice to a boy he apparently didn’t care for.

“C’mon, Mikasa, we’re not going to judge you if your house is small or whatever. And I swear Jaeger, mention this to anyone and I’ll slit your fucking throat,” he said down to Eren, who groaned quietly and bought his hand up to shield his eyes. “You’re awake,” Jean realised, “You little shit.” The pointed look directed towards Armin as Mikasa acquiesced and led them to the right suggested to Armin that Jean’s acceptance (or whatever it was) was something to do with him. 

On the one hand, Armin was pleased when they first arrived outside the Jaeger household, because it meant he could go home and get dry; it meant they had achieved their goal of getting Eren home; as well as the relief that, despite Eren’s stories about being from and East German family, the house seemed pretty normal: a relatively small post-war terrace, architecturally minimalistic and slightly worn with time, but wholly liveable. However, Mikasa was acting strange. She was fumbling in her bag for her keys, and fumbling didn’t seem to suit Mikasa- she was so together and sure of herself that seeing her fingers trip over the contents of her rucksack in the dark was somewhat stressing for Armin to watch. Eventually, Jean set Eren down, getting Armin to hold him steady while he poked the doorbell.

“Why did you do that,” Mikasa hissed, and a moment later, she held up the keys. It was, however, too late for her to reverse Jean’s action, as they heard fumbling on the other side of the door.

Given how much of an impact Eren and Mikasa had had on Armin’s life in such a short space of time, Armin subconsciously expected meeting Eren’s parents to be a memorable affair. In a way, the event would shape a number of realisations for Armin that he would fit together later, but at the moment when the door opened and a man appeared, he didn’t know that. What struck him first was how, on first glance, the man he assumed to be Eren’s father was the spitting image of John Lennon, except older and more haggard-looking, with deep lines creasing his face into a moderate frown. He also looked nothing at all like Eren- the thing striking him the most being how much drastically paler the man stood in front of him was compared to Eren. Armin wasn’t sure if it was racist to wonder if this man, with his skin the colour of mashed potato, was even related to the boy who’d drunkenly ravished him not an hour earlier.

It took him mere moments, however, to realise that this was far from the most striking thing about Grisha Jaeger. Rather, the way Eren and Mikasa regarded him was something that, unlike his exact skin tone, Armin wasn’t sure he’d ever forget. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was that their expressions shared, but Eren found, very suddenly, the ability to stand and hold his gaze steady.

“Mikasa, we thought you were coming back later,” he said. His voice was curt, and Jean and Armin became confused as they noticed how he used the singular form of “you”- as if he hadn’t remarked Eren.

“I’m sorry, we should have messaged,” Mikasa apologised, unable to look at Eren. 

“There’s not enough room for friends, I’m afraid,” he said, and Armin could only nod as the man’s gaze passed over him. There was something overpowering about his presence that wasn’t dislikeable at all, merely aroused a strange feeling. 

Eren definitely knew he was in trouble. He let go of Armin as if he were toxic, despite barely being conscious. 

“It’s OK, we were just making sure they got home safe,” Jean shot his winning smile that Armin thought he only reserved for pretty girls and his favourite teachers, but it wasn’t reciprocated. 

Armin didn’t remember what happened next, other than watching the back of Eren’s head for no reason in particular other than to avoid everything else. At some point, however, the tense conversation on the doorstep ended and Mikasa and Eren went inside.

Neither of them said goodbye.


	12. Link

“’M starving,” Jean said, after a few moments pause once they’d been plunged back into darkness. Armin couldn’t quite believe his ears. He was too preoccupied trying to suss out what had been wrong with the siblings’ reactions to the man on the doorstep.

“Armin?” Jean asked. Armin looked round to find Jean staring down at him, no longer smiling and joking. If anything, he looked tired. “We need to talk, but here is obviously not the best place.”

Jean probably wasn’t thinking that “the best place” was a pizza joint three blocks away from the midpoint between Eren’s and Armin’s house, but that was where they ended up anyway. Despite Jean offering to pay, they split the price of a medium-sized pizza, which they both picked at, Armin wiping the grease off absent-mindedly with a cheap napkin before taking a bite into the rubbery cheese.

Armin decided to get straight to the point. “You were really nice to Eren.”

“Not that much. I’d do the same for you.”

“Y-Yeah, but… uh… Don’t you hate him?”

“Jesus Armin, not enough to have him passed-out outside my house. I couldn’t just leave him there,” he snapped, staring out the window into the thick night.

“So that’s why you carried him like that?” 

“Drop it,” Jean growled, before fabricating his justification to himself, “That was for Mikasa’s sake anyway.”

There was a silence, and Armin fiddled with his pizza, chewing thoughtfully as the evening’s events replayed in his head over and over, involuntarily. Part of him wished he’d drunk more: he might not have been so blisteringly aware of how many problems the three-odd hours had highlighted between the four teenagers if he could remember less of what had happened. Even if not that, it might have softened the minute details playing on his mind: the loose bit of skin on one of Eren’s many cuts, the way Mikasa rubbed her eyes when being questioned about Grisha, the way Eren had looked as if he’d forgotten who Armin was as he quickly let go of him in front of his father.

“How did it go with Mikasa?” Engaging Jean seemed a good way to occupy himself with other thoughts that were less likely to eat away at him.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel about her.” Jean paused, finishing his bite of pizza. “Y’know, I had planned to take you out afterwards after I failed to talk to you about what I really wanted to talk to you about earlier, which wasn’t really spiking Eren’s drink. Except now… I don’t know Armin, I’m not sure.”

“What were you going to say?”

“I was going to ask you about Eren. I mean… Christa was talking about you the other day, and how you’ve really gotten happier since Eren and Mikasa arrived-”

“Wait,” Armin interrupted, “You were talking about me?”

“Yeah. Look, when I kicked off at Eren last week, and you told me I was dumb because Eren was mute and I’d picked on him for it, you weren’t the only one. Everyone was looking at me weirdly all week. So I guess Christa paying more attention meant she noticed you and Eren were getting more pally… or whatever… and came to tell me how you used to feel about me. Except, it wasn’t just a bitchy thing… Y’know? I think Christa cares, she noticed you’d changed… We used to be good friends, right, Armin? W… Was I a dick to you?”

Armin was taken aback. “I-I-Is that why you took care of Eren?”

“Fuck, don’t say it like that,” Jean flattened his hair down vainly, “It wasn’t that much of a big deal. But yeah, partially to do with you, partially to do with Eren… And trying to impress Mikasa-”

“Even though you’re conflicted on how you feel about her,” Armin finished. It made sense, Armin supposed: the evening had demonstrated to Jean not only how much work the siblings were, but also how deep their still undefined relationship went. Jean seeing this and recognising that this meant he would have to make peace with Eren before he could understand anyone’s feelings, including his and Mikasa’s, reminded Armin of exactly why he had become friends with Jean in the first place. He had an artist’s mind, and while he may not have had many friends, he always excelled at psychology, seemingly being the one who could read people the letter without being entirely sure of what to do with the consequent information.

Maybe Armin had Jean wrong. He seemed to have the best moral compass of all of them.

“Yeah,” Jean said after a moment, dragging his agreement out into a melancholic sigh. 

“S-So, you don’t want to talk about… about Mikasa?” Armin was nervous about asking for some reason. Perhaps it was his guilt for having left her to comfort Eren still resonating somewhat.

“No, I already said, I intended to talk about Eren. I was going to ask… I…” He paused, “I saw you out of the window. K-Kissing... I mean…”

“Oh god,” Armin squeaked, and automatically hid his face. His cheeks burned.

“C-Chill, Armin… It’s not like I wanted to, I-I mean I already knew you had a thing for Eren but… Urgh, that’s not the fucking point I was trying to make. That was the least… Earlier I was going to ask you if you were sure about Eren, and if you didn’t convince me I was going to try… I don’t know, get Mikasa on side, change Eren’s mind about you… I’m kind of glad,” he laughed haggardly, “It would have been difficult to get Eren to not be interested in you; his eyes were fucking love-hearts at you. Fucking gross. No… I mean, obviously what happened and shit… Eren’s a good person. Sure, I’m sorry. Fucking angry, but after yesterday and Mikasa and the pen, maybe I understand why, kind of. And… Was that his dad we met? Grisha?”

“I guess so,” Armin gulped.

“There’s something wrong with him. He seemed nice enough, except completely blanking Eren was just… Like, the guy’s obviously treated like shit to hate himself so much, and I hate to make assumptions, but… I’m not… Something’s amiss, that’s all.”

“Y-You think Eren’s home life has something to do with his mutism and…”

“Maybe not his mutism, though I think that makes things harder for him. But yeah. And Mikasa… What about Mikasa? I don’t get it? Why isn’t she fucked-up?”

“Don’t call Eren fucked-up, Jean,” Armin whispered. Jean nodded apologetically.

“Sorry. I guess she’s quiet, maybe you can’t tell.

“So you think Eren’s parents are bad?”

Jean looked down at him, mouth half-full of pizza. He chewed thoughtfully, putting a finger up to indicate he wanted to speak, but not doing so until he’d swallowed. “They can’t be great if he got kicked out of his last school.” 

Armin didn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t entirely sure what father’s did- he didn’t have one, and when he came to think of it, he always assumed Jean had a dad, but had never met him or heard him allude to him in any way, so maybe he was completely wrong on that count. Had that been what Eren was talking about when he’d said his family was East German? Was his family like the plot of “Goodbye Lenin”? 

Armin stared down at his pizza, before extracting his phone from his pocket to check the time. It was only 7.35. 

“Oh shit, I forgot, I should text Marco. Fuck. What… Are you coming round again? You could change at yours and come hang with me and Marco?”

“Uh…” Armin had no desire to sit and stare at the walls of his bedroom, feeling like his every move would irritate his mother, so it wasn’t a question of whether he wanted to stay out all night or not, as he’d already told his mother he was doing. “Can I just borrow an old t-shirt or something? I don’t know; I don’t want to have to explain to my mother about Eren and stuff.” 

“She never liked me either,” Jean reflected, “Sure, guess so. Cool.” 

Armin was glad he didn’t ask him to elaborate on why he didn’t want his mother to know about Eren, thinking back to how Eren had turned up on his doorstep the day before he skipped school. Come to think of it, had he been avoiding going home? Armin had assumed it was just Eren trying to deal with his own feelings in his own idiosyncratic way (hence he’d stopped at Armin’s, but not said what he’d wanted to say), but Mikasa had told him to tell Eren that Grisha wasn’t home.

Suddenly, Armin did want to tell Jean about that incident, but Jean was on his phone, texting furiously to Marco, so Armin let it slide. He looked down at his own phone lock-screen. 

He started by messaging Mikasa. It took him a while before he was happy with the text he’d drafted. 

**Mikasa, I’m sorry if I was rude earlier. I want to get to know you better as someone not related to Eren, because you’re really nice and you need to take better care of yourself. Eren didn’t mean what he said either. Are you in trouble?**

There was lots more he wanted to say, but some of them sounded like things he was only saying because he was slightly tipsy still, and because the dark seemed to have already have pushed him into that area of liminality where he wasn’t sure what was wrong and what was right, and when too much had been said. So he hit send, without telling her to look after herself, or asking about why she needed him, or asking about Eren or whether the man on the doorstep was definitely Grisha, and if so, why Eren avoided him.

His text to Eren was harder.

**If you remember any of tonight, please don’t regret it in the morning. I like that you’re honest, and I hope I can show you you’re worth more than Franz Ehrlich.”**

Still no kisses, he decided. Ehrlich, after all, was a serious topic, and it seemed questionable to even use him in such a text, considering the deep connection Eren seemed to have with history, but Armin hoped he would take it as Armin trying to appeal to his interests, if not making his own point about history and the importance of the present.

Alas, Armin’s phone didn’t buzz all the time they were slowly finishing their pizza, and Armin pretended he didn’t mind, even though Jean was aware of what he’d done and was watching him like a child would watch a seed germinating. At some point, Jean’s plans became such that they quitted the restaurant, throwing the leftover pizza in the bin outside the door and making their way along the cracked pavements towards Armin’s U-Bahn stop, walking silently side-by-side, avoiding puddles as they went.

In fact, Armin’s phone wouldn’t buzz until after they’d met up with Marco, standing at a bus-stop watching their breath freeze, nearly two hours later. Jean seemed to invested in that text that he stopped Marco where he was waffling about how he’d been short-changed for his fare, regarding Armin carefully as he flicked his phone out of his pocket and began to read.

It was from Mikasa.

**Eren’s fine.**

“Y’see,” Jean cried once he’d read out the text, “That’s what she thinks now you decided Eren was more important than her.”

“I was your job to look after her, I thought you’d like the chance to show her what a great person you are,” Armin retorted, voice dripping with sarcasm. 

“I don’t know what’d going on, but ouch, Armin,” Marco remarked, and both Jean and Armin looked at him for a moment before having a silent consensus not to elaborate for him right that second, and Jean blocked Marco off with his body language, leaning close over Armin’s phone as he opened a new message to reply.

“What should I say?”

Jean didn’t reply, merely spaced out for a while, eyes lifeless in deep thought.

 **I wasn’t asking about Eren, Mikasa. He can reply to his own texts, surely? Jean and I just want to know you’re OK. I get it if you’re still mad.**

This time, she replied immediately.

**I’m not mad. I’m sorry about what happened. What did you text Eren?**

“Funny,” Armin said, “Eren said the same thing. As in, he apologised.”

“Yeah,” Jean frowned, ignoring Marco’s sheepish smile out of the corner of his eye, “And…?”

“I don’t know, neither of them seem to be the apologising type… Nevermind,” he finished, upon seeing the perseverance of Jean’s expression. He too was aware they were leaving out Marco, and it was reminding him of how things used to be between him and Jean. After all, it was all very well Jean resolving to be a better person to Armin and Eren if he continued to make the mistakes of the past with Marco.

**I told Eren not to regret what he’d told me. Why can’t he pick up his phone? Please don’t apologise, things seem difficult enough for you two.**

“I keep thinking this is melodramatic, until I remember what happened,” Jean muttered, and Armin nodded.

**Eren’s asleep. Please don’t text him when he’s at home, it’s important.**

“What!” Jean exclaimed before Armin had a chance to tell him not to read other people’s text messages, but he’d already fogged up the screen with his breath. “Asleep?”

“He was pretty drunk.”

“He hadn’t even had enough to get that blind drunk. You didn’t give him something, did you?” Jean looked down his nose at Armin.

“N-No! And I guess he was already a little bit tipsy by the time he arrived, so…”

“Yeah, but wouldn’t it have worn off after then?”

“You’re the one who spiked his drink!” Armin finally exclaimed, and hated himself immediately afterwards. He and Jean had been doing so well in reconciling what seemed to be years of pent-up frustrations and disquiets about each other, and here he was. He’d reduced himself to blaming Jean for what Eren had, in a sense, bought upon himself; except the drink spiking. Armin was implicit in that as much as Jean.

“What did you two do to Eren?” Marco exclaimed again, and this time, they didn’t ignore him. 

“It’s not how it sounds Marco,” Jean said quickly, rounding on him by using his heel as a pivot. “Well yeah, we spiked his drink, but he wanted to-”

Marco frowned. Armin had never seen Marco with an expression other than quiet contentment on his rounded freckly face before, so it was odd seeing his brows knit together with tension and his eyes narrow at the pair of them. “Jean… and Armin… If you’re going to tell me Eren wanted his drink spiked, so help me…”

“OK, OK… He wanted to get drunk. We… We shouldn’t have spiked his drink though.”

“Jean!” Armin gasped, and Armin saw Jean momentarily panic as he looked round to see what had caused Armin to exclaim in such a high-pitched manner. When he found nothing obvious wrong to warrant his sudden outburst, Jean’s expression moved to one of more reserved concern, with a hint of disquiet and paranoia. “Jean,” Armin repeated again, not quite able to speak for a moment with Jean looking at him so intensely, “What if… What if Eren being drunk is our fault and it’s the reason he’s in trouble… We’re the reason he’s in trouble!”

“Jesus, Armin, calm down,” Jean put his hands on Armin’s shoulders, “Fucking… It wasn’t entirely us, but yeah… I don’t know, fuck…!” 

That final curse word rang in Armin’s ears all evening. Eventually Jean let go of Armin, exchanging with him a sort of parting glance that told him the case was closed while Marco (who Armin was sure Jean regarded as having some sort of moral purity) was around before they broke each other’s gaze.

He felt as if he were meant to send another text. Perhaps he should have; as consequent events would pan out, he never got the chance to discuss with Mikasa whether she thought he’d made the right decision by leaving what pitiful potential of the conversation was hanging. It felt cheap to wish her a good night, or even ask about Eren; yet it seemed invasive to push any more pressing topics further than he already had.

Sometime during the night, he stopped revelling in the memory of Eren’s cut lip against his neck and sank back into the ceaseless tide of life, letting his thoughts dull into a light and meaningless sleep. He left early in the morning, before Jean or Marco awoke. Jean’s sleeping face was not one he could endure much anymore. At least, he didn’t think it was; he didn’t actually look, he didn’t want himself to. He just pulled on his damp shoes and let himself out, closing the door quietly behind him.

On the street outside Jean’s house, the puddles were deep from the night before, and a thick fog had fallen over night, leaving the city hidden and still. As he made his way along the road, unseen cars passed by, nothing more than headlamps obscured by a blurry layer of mist, like liquid tissue floating between Armin and the reality of the world. Armin would find that, like his melancholy, and subconscious aching desire to pay a visit to the Jaeger household, the weather would not lift for a long while. He ignored both by returning back to his flat and kicking off his now once again sodden shoes outside the door before padding through the silent apartment into the bathroom. There, he drowned his consciousness in lukewarm water, standing under the shower-head until his mother awoke and banged on the door.

Even with hindsight, he would never be sure if this melancholy was the right way to act at such a time. Indeed, he didn’t feel he had a choice. He was restrained by Mikasa’s request that he not text Eren while he was at home, plus his own reluctance to supposedly push either of them over the edge when he himself felt a large degree of guilt for what he supposed had befallen them. That and, like the fog, the crushing feeling of utter failure and despair seemed to infiltrate his very being, filling up his pores until he was suffocating. He was incarcerated in his own guilt.

Neither Eren nor Mikasa were in on Monday. Armin didn’t notice until lunch, when he searched the whole school in case they’d been absent for a meeting or some other of rationality spewed from Armin’s increasingly frantic fabrications. When he finally got his wits together and used his blond-haired charm and baby-like smile to take a peek at the registers, he found, quite peculiarly, that they’d been marked as ill.

He kept Jean out of it. He wasn’t sure if that was a decision made consciously or not, but it worked both for and against him, as while he had no colourful English swear words to narrate his thoughts aloud, he got himself tasked with taking the siblings’ work to their house by the bespectacled Child Liaison Officer (or so he called himself) the following day.

He hadn’t known that being ill warranted work to be sent home, but that was (as many would find unsurprising) because he’d never had a day off. He thanked his shoes silently that he was so conveniently passing by the school office when the Child Liaison Officer tripped out of the door with an empty coffee mug. Speaking with a strong Berlin accent, with his eyes roaming Armin’s face restlessly as he garbled, he showed Armin back through to his office, where he forsook the coffee cup on a stack of papers and gifted Armin with the opportunity to make his way, as he was doing, past his own flat to the one place he’d wanted to visit since Friday night had drawn to a close.

The house looked the same as it had on the previous Friday, though it was still only dusk, and the upstairs light was turned on. Armin tried not to wonder whose room that was. Not only did Armin think people would find him weird if he regarded the house in such a way, but he imagined Eren’s room to be, disappointingly, much like his own: bland and unfeeling, judging by the undefined harshness about the supposed father-figure of Grisha.

He rang the doorbell, taking the papers from under his arm.

It took a while for someone to answer. Not oddly long: just long enough to be socially-acceptable, yet still not quick. Armin wished he’d bought Jean when a woman opened the door.

The East German mother Mikasa and Eren had talked about was something more than that. She had an incredible presence: she was obviously related to Eren as she looked almost the female version of him, if not older, less skinny and with softer-shaped eyes, and her intelligent gaze seemed to be contradicted in every way by the way she put herself across to Armin as the submissive, quiet mother, from the way she held herself small to her purposely non-intrusive, relaxed hairstyle. She had noticeable frown lines but a face that seemed incapable of anything other than a meek smile; wore minimal make-up that seemed to accentuate nothing, yet her gaze accused Armin, interrogated him, pardoned him and welcomed him, all in the space of a heartbeat.

“Er… Hi,” he squeaked, reminding himself not to hide behind his fringe. “Um, is Eren or Mikasa in?” 

She had to consider it. Armin didn’t think she looked like someone who would lie, but he couldn’t ignore the pause as she surreptitiously looked him up and down. If he’d been anything other than a weedy blonde bookworm of a teenager, he might have had the audacity to seize that moment to invite himself in, but as things panned out, he stayed on the doorstep.

She was scratching her wrists. It was the crack in her perfect aura that reminded Armin of Eren’s same obsessive, self-destructive nature. 

He wanted to see this woman get as mad as Eren did. Something told him it would do her good.

“They’re in bed at the moment. They’re not too well, we think it’s the flu… You’re welcome to go up but I’m not sure if they’re awake.”

“I-It’s fine,” Armin found himself saying. Her excessive politeness meant he was unable to respond otherwise. Plus, why should he be distrustful of her? She surely had nothing to hide if she was inviting him in. It would have been embarrassing for him to have to explain that he had been suspicious of the pair having two days off school when their parents had to have rung in to declare this.

He handed her the work, she smiled as she asked for his name, and he smiled back as he bade farewell. It was only when she closed the door a few seconds later that Armin wanted to kick himself for having missed his opportunity to get to the bottom of the enigma of the East German household.

It was ridiculous, how much he missed two people he’d barely known a few weeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Idk if you can tell but I really like Carla Jaeger. Or rather, I like reading into her characterisation and making a mother into an interesting character, plus, dissassembling the dumb shounen manga cliche of a boy's links to his father like fuck that bruh


	13. Review Original Hypothesis

Armin wasn’t even an extrovert, let alone a confrontational person, and he thought most people knew that. Indeed, he’d have thought he had constructed this falsity to keep himself out of trouble’s way, his head in a book, maintaining his presence as the boy with the good grades who didn’t really matter anymore.

Except since he’d met Eren, this perception others had of him (and had had for what seemed like an eternity) was torn down again and again, until Armin began noticing it almost every hour. 

It would have started with his sauntering out of the classroom after Eren the previous Friday, his parting words designed to jab Jean where it hurt. After that, people began to notice the sudden friendship struck up between the two new students and Armin, despite the fact that they’d been almost strangers only a few days beforehand, and Christa had theorised that there must have been some intense meeting to have formed a bond such as there that looked as if it had existed for years. Jean called this chemistry because he knew Armin too well, but no one listened until Eren whispered something no-one else could hear in Armin’s ear in front of everyone. Teenage boys didn’t get that close to other teenage boys, especially if one of them had always been assumed to be as straight as a roundabout.

Armin saw things changing. People didn’t look through him anymore- they struck up conversation, asking about banalities such as his classes before asking him about Mikasa and, more often, Eren. There was an undefinable buzz around him when Jean came over to lean on his desk on Wednesday morning, which seemed only to intensify when he cracked a small smile. 

It was because of this that Armin was relieved that what happened the next time he saw Eren and Mikasa happened in front of relatively few people.

Jean had run into Armin on the U-Bahn on Thursday morning. Or rather, as Armin suspected, Jean had followed Armin from outside his house into the station and conveniently hopped on the other end of the carriage, so they could meet at the turnstiles at the station down the road from the Gymnasium. He didn’t mention how obvious it was to Jean, or that he’d caught a glimpse of his idiosyncratic hair as he boarded his carriage. He was too tired.

Jean talked about his art assignment to fill the void of silence hanging between them, detailing his feelings on his current artistic trajectory with the usual number of foreign swear words, which startled a number of old ladies as they walked by. After all, while he had other shortcomings, Jean was not someone Armin had ever considered uninteresting. He read enough (though not as much as Armin) and formed his own opinions that he stuck to like a limpet, with the odd point on which he would surrender to the opposite view without any warning whatsoever. 

“Fuck her though. I mean, Abitur is great if you’re obnoxious enough to take the prompt and run with it, otherwise you want to shank someone with a bloody paintbrush because it’s so fucking… I don’t know, it’s so single-minded and she’ll get you on her weird-arse little agenda for odd-looking fine art. Maybe some of us don’t like fine art, y’know? I-”

He was cut off by a loud noise behind them. 

The noise in question turned out to be someone slapping two textbooks together, but Jean and Armin couldn’t work this out until they’d turned round simultaneously and saw the person in question with the textbooks still stretched out in front of them, as if ready to go again. 

“Eren! Mikasa!” Armin cried, not meaning for his voice to go a loud or as high as it did. He attracted a few strange glances for this, including one from Jean that said a number of things with a cocked eyebrow and lips pursed tight together, like a sour old woman.

“I’ll be just ahead,” Jean muttered.

It felt like it took an age for the siblings to catch up with Armin, even though he’d stopped in the middle of the pavement. In this time, Armin recovered from the initial happiness of seeing two people that meant an incredible amount to him for the first time in just under a week. The guilt was first to come flooding back to him, followed instantaneously by the worry and suspicion, following his queer visit to the Jaeger household on Tuesday evening. 

Eren looked different. He wasn’t sure how, but he did. He came off as more aggressive, despite the fact he was smiling. Armin couldn’t put his finger on it. Perhaps it was his hair, Armin thought, which seemed quite matted compared even to its usual state of disarray. Then again, his face also looked darker, as if a storm cloud had come to rest over it, taking the saturation from his skin colour and leaving him with a worn-out, grey appearance.

“Uh,” Armin began as they approached him, Eren holding the textbooks and his rucksack in his arms, “Hi.” 

Eren held up a finger, indicating for them to wait, as he put his bag down on the ground to return the textbooks where they belonged and retrieve his notebook. It was a new notebook: smaller than the old one, and blood red. 

“You wouldn’t need to mess around with books if you just tried to speak, Eren,” Mikasa said sharply. 

“Mikasa…” Armin wanted to say something about understanding and how Eren would speak if he could, but it seemed wrong to assume he knew more than Mikasa. He also still owed her some sort of apology, so used the attention she’d paid him by saying her name to continue with, “Mikasa… I’m sorry about Friday. I-I know you said you weren’t mad but…”

Eren interrupted. _I wouldn’t need to mess around with textbooks if you’d just called Armin’s name._

“It’s fine,” Armin said quickly, “It was kind of funny. I-I think Jean’s a little unnerved,” he giggled nervously, glancing over his shoulder. 

He felt a creeping realisation that he was feeling incredibly uncomfortable with people he held very intimate relationships with. It was unnerving. He couldn’t help but feel betrayed by the fact Eren and Mikasa had obviously had the time to overcome Friday night’s events between them, leaving Armin feeling lost about where he stood and to whom he owed an apology.

“S-S-So, a-are you guys feeling better?” he stammered as the started walking. It didn’t go unnoticed by any of them that Jean was hanging up ahead, and while no one greeted him yet, the hostility between the him and the siblings from before had completely dissipated. 

“Feeling better?” Mikasa asked. Armin was taken aback by how spiky she seemed, as if her and Eren had swapped personalities. 

“Yeah, uh… Do you still feel ill?”

“Who told you we were ill?” Mikasa threw the question back at him, and Armin looked to Eren for guidance. Eren, however, merely blinked. He was obviously listening to the conversation, but wasn’t holding his notebook ready, as if he had predestined himself no interest in partaking. It was as if he’d decided to stay docile while Mikasa sparred with words in front of him, a helpless bystander to his own life.

“Didn’t your mum tell you I came round with that work?”

Mikasa smirked, which didn’t seem to fit her answer, “I thought it was you. Did she say we were ill?”

“Weren’t you?” Armin mumbled, unsure how to proceed. This conversation was uncomfortable, because he’d resolved that the time they spent off school was due to illness, and now the last person he would have expected was giving him reason to think otherwise. He wasn’t sure why, but he’d began to associate Mikasa with the enforcement of the “East German” aspect of Eren’s life, given his resistance to her, but maybe this was far from the truth. He got the feeling he’d never work it out.

Eren elbowed Mikasa hard then, stopping her from replying. 

Clearly, Armin thought, he’d changed his tact.

“What… I-It’s OK if you don’t want to talk about it-”

“No, Armin,” Mikasa said forcefully, and Armin wondered why she appeared to be on the warpath so early in the morning. Armin could see Eren becoming irate. Was this for show; or was this perhaps a longer-term quarrel rooting from the previous Friday? “It needs to be talked about. You’re the one who keeps trying to apologise for something you don’t even understand.”

That hurt.

 _Step off._ A note directed to Mikasa, but which Eren let Armin see. Was it reasonable for Eren to want to hide why they were off? 

Armin remembered the day the week before that Eren alone had had off, the day after they’d gone to the Brandenburg Gate. Armin couldn’t rationalise how the two absences could be related, but he found it strange that it happened the days after something happened to Eren in the evening or he was reluctant about returning home.

“No, not unless you can tell me to.”

This time it was Eren’s turn to look at Armin for help, a sort of desperation yet longing, and it took a moment to compute what Eren was trying to say. Essentially, for Eren to be able to communicate verbally with Mikasa, Armin would have to leave.

“No, not that, either,” she gritted her teeth, “Armin stays. You think I don’t know how you feel about him, Eren?”

This time when Eren scribbled something, he didn’t show Armin what he’d written.

“No. Armin, ask him what he’s afraid of.”

“I… can’t,” Armin was verging on tears as he watched the scene unfold before him. They’d stopped now, stood in the middle of the pavement in the quiet morning round the back of the school. It only took one look from Armin for Jean to start making his way back towards them, like some kind of lanky, underpaid bodyguard.

“We weren’t ill, Armin, we-” 

She was cut off as Eren lunged at her, clamping his hands over her mouth. She wrestled him off easily, ignoring Jean as he jogged up to the altercation to act as an unspoken umpire.

“Mikasa,” Armin eventually spluttered, tears breaking and rolling down his cheeks, “Please stop! Whatever you’re going to tell me I don’t necessarily need to know, and it’s Eren’s business if he wants to tell me! Please stop fighting!”

“Yeah, and chill on getting him to speak,” Jean added, and Armin admired his bravery. For a split second, Eren looked thankful for Jean’s presence: it seemed to balance the situation, making whatever Mikasa wanted to say specifically to Armin supposedly unsayable.

Except she apparently didn’t need to say anything. All she needed, in fact, was that single split second where Eren was distracted, where she unexpectedly grabbed the back of his t-shirt and jumper, and pulled it up to his neck, revealing the bare skin of his back.

Armin made the mistake of looking at Eren’s face first, as he tried to struggle free from Mikasa’s iron grip. He was mortified: and not in the normal way that one would be from having so much skin exposed in public, but in a way that tapped into some sense of the repressed; of an untouched anger and secrecy that it seemed treason to flaunt so openly. It was only then that Armin’s eyes moved to the skin on Eren’s back, and his stomach lurched.

Regardless of the tears already blurring his vision, there was no way Armin could unsee those marks on Eren’s back.

Armin had heard it said that his generation was the vainest, the most desensitised, the most apathetic. Or, rather, it wasn’t as popular to say in Germany, given what past generations had experienced in their lifetimes, but nevertheless, Armin heard it said: whispered through gritted teeth or in small, standard print on an inconsequential newspaper sheet. Armin agreed to an extent, but only because he saw a gradual regression like this in himself. His mum hadn’t grown up seeing pixelated but still all too real footage of beheadings on the news, hearing about a new case of child abuse every other day, or seeing internet pop-ups advertising women like they were objects to be manhandled. He’d thought he’d seen it all, and yet those bruises made it all so horribly real, at the same time as making it seem like a familiar story, one he’d heard time and time before.

The worst thing was that Armin’s first thought was to downplay the severity of his injuries, momentarily forgetting the split-lip. There were three or four large bruises, one of them clearly hand-shaped, but none of them bad enough to have caused the sort of discolouration than that underneath Eren’s lip. There was no blood, and, had he have photographed them and sent them into the papers, they wouldn’t outrage anyone, despite the obvious pain they were causing him.

The only reason Eren managed to slip free was because Mikasa let him go. Once she’d seen the horror cross Armin’s face, she was satisfied; relieved even. 

“It’s out now, Eren,” she laughed, and in that moment, Armin wanted to burst into tears all over again, because he wasn’t sure if he’d just watched the most hateful thing in the universe, or if there was more to it. Even Jean didn’t know how to react, stepping away from Mikasa with his hands up while keeping his eyes fixed on Eren. Armin’s mind was spinning with questions to which he knew the answers but was scared of being sure. 

Eren left. It was predictable for him to do, yet it still hurt Armin, seeing his back turned as he carried his rucksack in his arms towards the school. He knew what that back looked like now, underneath those clothes. 

Mikasa laughed again. At first, it was just a guffaw, as if she’d accidentally let out a sound, but after a moment her shoulders seemed to loosen and, much to Jean and Armin’s horror, she became hysterical. Peals and peals of laughter left tears streaming down her face, and she wouldn’t look at either of them. It was terrifying, as if she’d gone mad. In a way, it made Armin realise why he’d found himself staying there, rather than running off after Eren, who by now had disappeared into the morning rush: he had to understand Mikasa’s motives for doing something like that before he could begin to try and talk to Eren again.

What if Eren never talked to him again?

Maybe he deserved it, Armin told himself. It was Armin’s fault Eren’s back looked like that- like Mephistopheles himself, Armin wreaked havoc upon the souls of mortals, letting them doom themselves while lamenting his own misfortunes. 

“Get a hold of yourself, Mikasa!” Jean yelled, and his voice was high-pitched. Armin had never seen him so scared in his life, despite the fact that they’d known each other since Grundschule. He took a wary step forward. They both flinched as Mikasa fell to her knees, still sobbing.

Eventually she became more subdued- in comparison only, each tear she shed was still a direct challenge to the stoic Mikasa Armin held her up to be- and took a seat on the edge of the pavement. 

“I feel relieved,” she said, sniffing, “Isn’t that horrible? Aren’t I such a terrible person?”

The air thickened then, and Armin didn’t dare look at Jean, as they both became overcome with guilt. They took seats either side of her, but didn’t come too close. 

“I didn’t ask for Grisha to treat him the way he does. I don’t care if it’s selfish, why should I be the only one to have to put up with it?”

Armin was torn. These were very raw sentiments; sentiments he barely ever came across, even in his own mind. He was unable to come to a solid conclusion about where his moral compass should be. He wanted to slap her, he wanted to hug her. He also wanted to walk away and never talk to any of the three teenagers again- four, including Marco- and at the same time put his arm around her and lead her somewhere where she could pour her heart out like strong bleach.

She continued after a while, fiddling with a rock on the ground so she didn’t have to remember where she was or who she was with, “E-Eren hates me for not being able to stop it, but he doesn’t realise that if he could just speak… He’s supposed to stand up for himself, it’s not me. I have to see him hurt, I have to watch him hurt himself, and then I comfort him while knowing all the while that the only person who could have stopped it was me… It’s easy for him. I shouldn’t say that, but it is, he hates everyone and I can’t I can’t I can’t hate him.” She began shaking her head wildly, raven hair flicking about her ears. 

Jean grabbed her. Armin could see in his eye that the contact shocked him, and he suddenly maddened, overpowered with adrenaline. He shook her rigidly until she was still.

“How is it fucking easy to hate someone? How is it easy to be possessed by those kinds of feelings every moment of every day? How are you supposed to live if you’re unable to see the good side? Everything is miserable and it takes so much anguish and pain and suffering to get a person like Eren to a point where their entire body becomes a… a… a vehicle, for every single fucking thing wrong in the world. He holds onto every single degrading comment and punch or whatever and that is his entire being. You said he wanted to kill himself: do you want him dead?”

“NO!” Mikasa cried. 

“Jean!” 

Jean was holding her wrists now as she struggled. She didn’t want to hear what he had to say, but he spoke fast and his voice was strong with rage. “Eren has been pushed down time and time again and all you can think about is yourself? Do you think he likes not being able to speak? Do you think he likes being pushed around by people like me? Do you think a normal person drinks to unconsciousness just to be able to make fucking conversation? No, it can’t be easy for you, but don’t fucking throw Eren under the wheel to make your point,” he spat.

“What do you know? You don’t get it, neither of you. You can escape it, I’ve… I have to see everything, I can’t… Those bruises are the least of it!”

“GO ON THEN,” Jean roared, looming over her, “FUCKING TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED. FRIDAY NIGHT. SAY IT.”

“No… I… We…”

“GO ON!”

“I can’t! Please, I will, but…” she stopped, crying out to Jean’s face, and once again, Armin saw the shift in Jean’s expression. He loosened his grip and suddenly his strong hands were on her head, holding her close to his chest as her body shook with tears.

“I’m sorry, we… It’s been so long, we never talk about it. I want… I-I want it out, I can’t do it anymore,” she moaned softly, whimpering like a newborn baby.

“Wait,” Armin called, “When you said you “needed” me to help Eren…”

“What,” Jean butted in, but Armin persevered, pretending he didn’t hear.

“…You could have told us. Anyone. A teacher.” He struggled to keep calm, levelling his voice at a genre of detached but empathetic so Mikasa knew he neither condemned nor agreed with her view of the situation. “It’s not Eren’s fault that that happens to him, and it’s not your job to protect him. I… I can’t help him, not with something that big, and neither can you.”

Mikasa sniffed. “Why don’t you hate me?” she asked, her eye glinting in the weak morning sun as she emerged from under Jean’s arm. Armin was surprised to see him back off naturally, as if the situation had given him a normal person’s sense of personal space.

“W-Why…?”

“Why don’t you hate me,” she repeated, more forcefully this time, not giving it the chance to sit in the air as a question should.

It sounded cliché in his head, but he wanted to know if he was having a bad dream. A little part of him kept telling him that his is how it would be from now on- chaos, a girl crying on a pavement, a lost boy, a tall guy who never became anything more special than the way he saw himself and Armin, pretending everything could go back to how it was. He didn’t want to believe that the only way Eren and Mikasa were the way they were was because they were keeping the horrific secret of Eren’s systematic abuse. 

This was the whole reason Mikasa wanted to know him, was it? To take a weight off her shoulders and abstain her from her crushing everyday guilt? Like a diversion of the inexorable, dense traffic of hatred; or a replaced U-bend, his whole being characterised by carrying other people’s shit?

He should hate her, indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK so this wasn't originally how this chapter was going to go? Things were going to take until lunchtime to slowly boil until it ended as a confrontation between Eren and Mikasa, at which point Armin and Jean would step in, Jean as a rage-fuelled umpire and Armin to ask Eren what was on his mind. At this point, Eren would redirect his anger towards Armin, eventually hurting him, before realising his mistake and taking him off elsewhere for privacy, at which point he would heed Mikasa's words and confess everything. So you know.
> 
> However:
> 
> a) I wanted to focus more on what Mikasa felt, because she contradicts herself a lot and y'all need to realise why she's conflicted?
> 
> b) People who are abused in such ways can seldom admit it to themselves, even years later. I thought it was far-fetched that someone as angry as Eren would be able to take such a level-headed, detached approach to his own skeletons in the closet.
> 
> c) Jean ain't no side character here. He was going to be the voice of reason but the way the story went, he's got too much unresolved in his relationships with the other three. A suivre.
> 
> The result might be a little melodramatic but...?


	14. Critique Variables and Control

Eventually, things calmed down. The raw shock of Eren’s darkest secret became nothing more than a dull fact of life. It became diluted as Mikasa began to ask how she could justify herself to his face, Jean become stiff and awkward once more, and Armin wondered why the world existed to treat with such abhorrence the best people in it. 

As Mikasa turned to go to class, there was a silent agreement between Jean and Armin that they wouldn’t follow her. Armin had never bunked a lesson in his life, but there was no way he could walk into a room full of people without caving in on himself now.

Jean reached for Armin. Not that Armin noticed until Mikasa turned back around, and out of the corner of his eye he noticed the hand being pulled sharply back. He wondered who the gesture was supposed to comfort.

“You…” Mikasa was nervous. Armin could tell, because her lips were dry and she licked them and licked them and licked them even made not the slightest bit of difference. “Jean. I-I… You’re not bad. As bad as I thought you were. Even when he was yelling at you, I never thought it looked like the real hatred he has; and you were good to him on Friday.” She turned towards Armin, “And I’m sorry I used you. It didn’t work anyway: he’s in love with you and I don’t know how he or I feel about that, yet… On Friday, when you sent those texts… Eren, he…” She looked as if she were struggling to get her tongue around the words. Armin could hear the blood rushing in his ears. “Grisha wanted to know if Eren had been up to anything, so he took his phone and his notebook. I wasn’t lying when I said Eren couldn’t answer his phone… But he wasn’t asleep, that was a lie. We were in my bed but he was awake, he didn’t say anything when I read him out your messages.”

“Why are you telling Ar-”

“Jean,” Armin put a finger up to silence Jean. It was very abrupt, but Jean wouldn’t mention it later.

“Eren was drunk, but he was also terrified and smelt like beer so Grisha didn’t go easy. We have a basement so Carla can’t hear… I don’t know if he knows that I know what goes on but when they’re not in the basement everything’s mostly normal-”

“Mostly normal? He fucking pretended Eren didn’t exist in front of me, you, and Armin,” Jean spat venomously, but Mikasa looked momentarily as if she wasn’t sure what he was talking about, before continuing stoically. 

“To sober him up he held his head underwater,” Mikasa said, not showing a grain of emotion as shock spread like a disease across the boys’ faces, “Until I think he said he threw up, and Grisha got mad that he’d made a mess and made those marks you just saw. They weren’t down there longer than ten minutes, but that basement is used for nothing else except that and it happens whenever Eren does anything wrong in Grisha’s eyes. Eren can’t make a sound either, so the neighbours don’t call the police, Carla can’t tell what’s happening and I can’t tell if he’s OK.”

Armin had no opportunity to question the story- if it could be called a story, because it was such a hellish depiction of real-life subverted that Armin wasn’t sure he could detach himself enough to call it a story. For one, he suddenly found himself unable to speak. At the same time, the bell sounded and Mikasa turned around again, leaving them watching her transformed back into her composed, cold self and throw her bag over her shoulder.

Once everyone had gone inside and the air had cleared, Jean had the opportunity once again to take Armin’s hand, and kissed him quickly on the lips. Armin started, jolting away.

“What was that for?” Armin asked, bringing his hand to his lips defensively, but his challenge lacked emotion. All Jean could do was frown down at him pityingly.

“What went wrong between us, Armin?”

“You’re acting weird,” he commented in reply, but he saw Jean decide to ignore it. Jean had already said that recently, if Armin remembered rightly, so what was it that meant this thought was a recurring one?

“I can’t love Mikasa. Her and Eren have something you and I can never steal.” 

“Is that some indirect way of telling me I should feel the same about Eren? I… Jean, I can’t deal with… this…”

He kissed him again, and this time Armin had the chance to struggle, pushing him away firmly.

“Jean, stop, y-you’re scaring me. T-This makes no sense, Mikasa just told us something we need to… we need to do something about, and you’re kissing me? It makes no sense Jean… Jean…” He wavered from the end of his sentence. “You were so noble back there, standing up for Eren. You do like him.”

“Fuck Eren. He’s an angry little shit and all… I can’t hate him,” Jean said, stepping back and running his hand through his hair. “You’re going to go and find him, right?”

Armin wasn’t sure, yet all the same ended up quietly saying, “Yeah.” He didn’t believe that Eren was so fragile as to be unable to function on his own, or indeed deal with the appalling by himself, but in this instance, it made Armin uncomfortable to not have his eye on him. Perhaps that made him full of himself; after all, Eren dealt sufficiently with everything life had ever thrown at him, proven by the fact he was still breathing.

Maybe that was it though, Armin thought. Surely there was a way to help Eren? Even if he and Jean alone couldn’t hold enough power to remove Eren from Grisha’s reach, they could surely find a way to get Eren help with his mutism or social anxiety to make other parts of his life better? Or was he thinking too much like Mikasa? Was Mikasa even wrong? Did Eren’s mental health issues and handicap perpetuate his abuse, did they cause it, or were they a result of it?

Armin’s head swirled with questions and memories which mixed like cake mixture: viscous and inconsistent. It seemed, however, that he had more pressing issues at hand, as Jean was still regarding him with a dewy look in his eye, like a lost doe.

“J-Jean. You… You’re feeling how I’m feeling aren’t you?”

“H-How do you mean?” Jean said gruffly, snapping out of his daze, and Armin blinked in amazement as he noticed the taller boy’s eyes had become misty with tears. He held them there, quite admirably in fact, not letting a single drop roll down his pale cheeks.

“You’re…” Armin began softly, wondering how to carve his words into a shape that would push Jean into action without fracturing him permanently. He kept only to the mutual sentiments between them, so not for it to seem he was blaming Jean for anything. “You’re confused, because you don’t know how you feel about anyone anymore; you feel guilty because of your implicit nature in the chain of events; you feel like the world isn’t real anymore yet also that it’s far too real and you’re totally powerless against its unerring force. You think if you kiss me you’ll want to trust in me, or believe that there’s a point to all this, but it just… It just upset you. Please don’t kiss me again, Jean.” Repeating his name was meant to bring him back down to the ground, but when Armin looked back into those icy blue eyes, Jean still looked detached from his own confusion.

“How did you become so eloquent?” he said, a dream-like lightness caught in his breath.

“Books, no friends,” Armin summarised, and Jean scowled.

“I’ll kiss you again if you don’t take that back.” 

It took Armin a moment to realise that was supposed to be a joke, though even Jean seemed loath to raise the corner of his lips to demonstrate this. Neither of them were thinking about each other right in that moment.

“I said there was something off about Eren’s dad,” Jean muttered to himself as Armin picked up his backpack from the side of the pavement, realising he’d lost the feeling in his fingers from being stood out in the icy morning for so long.

“None of us would have guessed,” Armin reminded him forlornly as they began to make their way up to the school.

Jean didn’t reply. In a way, he didn’t need to. He didn’t feel the need to detail anything more to Armin as they ducked in the back stairwell behind the arts corridors, where he stayed at Armin’s side. Armin directed him in hushed tones to search the stairwells and toilets of the other side of the courtyard, while Armin made his way towards the East block, darting past the German classroom he, Jean and Eren were supposed to be in, and despite his risking getting caught peeking in, he took a good look round the backs of heads. Alas, no luck, and he snuck off.

He was beginning to wonder if he should loop back to where he’d started and go round again when his phone vibrated in his bag.

**Maths toilets, but he’s locked the door.**

Armin didn’t sprint, but he did a little jog, unable to contain his nerves enough to keep himself thinking ahead. He played out scenarios in his head, each only a few seconds long, mapping out private fears and guilt in the shape of repetitive scenes, like from a play. Armin couldn’t talk him out, Eren came out and knew they’d spiked his drink, Jean was telling him they’d spiked his drink, Jean was telling him Armin had spiked his drink, Jean told him everything but realised he wasn’t behind the door anymore, Jean realised he wasn’t behind the door anymore and they didn’t know what he’d done… 

Until finally, there he was, stood in front of the maths toilets, and Jean and Eren were blinking at him as if he were mad.

It surprised Armin that Jean had talked Eren out so quickly. It also surprised him that they’d been having a conversation until he arrived; Eren now looked somewhat guilty holding his notebook and pen out to the taller boy.

“Armin… Are you OK?”

Those words were like a trigger. Real tears had been threatening all morning, like a storm brewing in his mind, and suddenly there was a crack and the downpour started. Armin would claim to anyone that he had no idea what came over him, but in reality, it was nothing more than a mixture between exhaustion and relief. A few weeks previously and the scene would have meant nothing to him, but now? Jean was someone Eren could depend on, and Eren looked whole, if not slightly weary, not to mention shocked when the blonde boy broke down in floods of tears.

Eren didn’t see Jean go to comfort Armin at the same time he did, not only because Eren couldn’t notice anything subtler than a flying pig, but because Jean caught himself, having to stand back as Eren and Armin folded themselves into each other. In a way, it hurt. However, it also reminded him why Eren should be important to him personally as much as he should be to Armin: because perhaps, if he couldn’t have Armin, he could make sure some other boy didn’t make the same mistakes he did.

Eren gave good hugs. Armin wasn’t sure he was entirely comfortable with the bodily contact, given that he seemed to falter a few times before committing to the move, and that Armin could hear his heart pounding from nerves. However, once Eren looped his arms round Armin, it became a proper hug; he held him tight and made him feel as if nothing could hurt him. It only made Armin cry harder when he realised that he should be the one making Eren feel that way. 

All he felt able to do was to clear his throat, nestling in the material of his jacket next to his neck, and whisper “I love you, Eren,” in a voice Eren found so sad and hopeless.

They didn’t stay at school long after that. Armin tried to ask Eren where Mikasa was, but then he seemed quite rightly disinterested in her whereabouts, seemingly more au fait with Jean’s presence that he would have been with hers. None of them said anything as they retraced their steps back to the station, taking the U-Bahn back past their stops and carrying on towards the centre of Berlin, where the morning was maturing into a loveless, cold day.

Jean was the one to lead them out of the station, where they stood in wonder, watching their breath condense as the beat of the city swelled around them, and down a side-street into a quiet deli up some stairs. As they walked, Armin remembered the Brandenburg Gate, and so, as if it were the most casual thing in the world, slipped his hand into Eren’s. 

Eren’s hands were so cold. Armin made a note to find out if Eren celebrated Hanukkah or Christmas at all, so he could find an excuse to buy him some gloves sometime soon.

Eren was clearly impressed by Jean’s knowledge of Berlin’s eateries. The deli-cum-coffee-shop was a little bit out of the way and above a shabby-looking pharmacy, hence didn’t seem to be as busy as city cafes normally were, but was all the same incredibly cosy. The floor was real wood and creaked as they stepped inside. It was furnished with fake cherry-wood tables and chairs fitted in maroon, with the walls painted a deep purple to create a dark yet pseudo-traditional atmosphere. Armin could see why Jean was taken with it. 

Jean insisted on paying. Armin wasn’t sure what motivation he had for doing so, but maybe, he supposed, it was time he stopped suspecting Jean of having ulterior motives. He seemed to have genuinely changed his approach to Eren, who wasn’t entirely reciprocating or suspicious (in equal measures) in return. Other than his newly-discovered romantic interest in Armin, he could think of no reason why Jean would need to be there otherwise. Even then, Armin highly doubted Jean would dare pulling a move when he would no doubt earn a punch for it.

The awkwardness returned to the fray when one of the assistants shooed them away from the counter (something which startled Eren; cafes probably weren’t places he frequented, not without someone to order for him at least), forcing the pair to take seats on the bench at the window. They overlooked the street, which gave Eren something to suddenly become interested in. 

Armin knew it'd hit him that he wasn’t going to escape interrogation. 

It wasn’t something Armin wanted to do, pry. He had questions though, he couldn’t help it, and Eren’s answering them wasn’t really for the gratification of their relationship or Armin’s patchy understanding of the timeline of events. For a student with the top grades in Ethics, Armin found it a moral grey-area. Did they have the right to ask questions if Eren was uncomfortable with it, or was it their duty to uncover his situation in order to try to help him? Armin worried that they weren’t the first ones who had tried to change things. It was possible he’d heard such questions and promises and professions of salvation before, and that he would look into Armin’s eyes with pity and see the folly in his naïve approach. Were they set to fail? Could Eren deny them? Should they even attempt something, or were they doomed to make things worse?

For one, Armin refused to assume Mikasa had never tried to help Eren. It would be helpful to know, truthfully, what exactly had silenced her.

“Mocha,” Jean professed, serving Armin a mug from a tray, “And that, Eren, is hot chocolate with rum, because you fucking need something like that.”

Eren smiled thinly, but became more genuinely amused by the garish design on the mug- a linocut-style Frohe Weihnachten scene set into a dark blue-navy. 

“Thanks Jean,” Armin smiled, watching Eren watch Jean as he held the drink in his skinny fingers. Jean, strangely, took a seat on the other side of the bench, so Eren was in the middle: something that didn’t go unnoticed by either Armin or Eren, both shuffling uncomfortably.

Eren stared out of the window a while longer, unseeing, clutching his drink to his lips but not taking a sip. Every now and again he’d become self-aware and give it a little blow, as if caring about cooling it, but Armin suspected he enjoyed the smell, as well as wanting a reason not to have to try to speak. 

Armin wiped his face with his sleeve then, taking the moment of silence to reflect on how tired he felt. His skin felt dirty. All that would serve to please him at that moment was wishing he could take Eren home and just cuddle under a blanket. 

He may have looked comfortable with that hot chocolate, but Armin had begun to notice that when he was in public, Eren avoided looking as if he were about to speak almost constantly: looking away more than usual, holding his head down, not making eye contact, and sometimes shrinking himself down into a stooping gait. Was it part of his anxiety, or was it to do with Mikasa? He wasn’t sure why he was so fixated with uncovering how the relationship between Eren and Mikasa worked. 

Perhaps it was jealousy.

Armin had nearly finished his mocha by the time Eren took a sip of his cocoa. Jean looked to expectant to be consoled with a smile or a thumbs up (not that Eren could muster either in his current state), so Eren placed the mug back on the table and reached down to his notebook. 

Armin kept forgetting the notebook had changed now, and it hurt to remember why. That old notebook had held Eren thoughts, notes and conversations, as well as silly squiggles and sketchy doodles of trees and sailing boats that so perfectly summarised Eren Jaeger. It was dispersonal, if not a complete betrayal, seeing him extract that formal-looking spiral-bound pad from his bag at his feet.

Upon finishing retrieving his bag, Eren sat back up again, except he banged his head on the underside of the table. He didn’t curse as he rocked violently on his stool, but once he’d regained balance he slammed his hands onto the table in frustration. The café went quiet momentarily, before the buzz resumed. 

Jean handed Eren two tissues- one for the minor amount of hot chocolate he’d spilt in the outburst, and one for the stray tears rolling down his cheeks as he battled with his own frustration and self-loathing.

“Eren, look at me,” Armin said, sounding calm but not at all feeling it. He held his arms firmly, being careful of his wrists, while Eren opened and closed his mouth, attempting over and over again to articulate himself but failing to make even the smallest noise. 

“Eren, chill,” Jean tried, and Armin found himself drawing a little pencil line in his head to denote where Jean’s understanding ended.

The tears were easing, but Armin felt it necessary to keep talking, in case this outburst triggered a panic attack, which he momentarily suspected it might have, “You don’t have to say anything. No one expects you to talk, you’re safe. It’s just me and Jean, right?”

Eren crying would never be something he could get used to, Armin reminded himself. The tears just seemed to be incidental to his face, as he was unaware of them, yet his eyes became dark and raw so quickly and his eyes became too intense: drawing him in with pain and suffering and beauty, just from how he regarded Armin. It was this, as well as the sudden yearning to take Eren’s hurts and kiss them better, one by one, that made it so satisfying to dab the tears from his eyes. 

Sniffing away tears was a noise he could make. He seemed surprised by this, which Armin found peculiar.

 _Mikasa told you then?_ He finally scribbled this and let Armin and Jean both lean in to read it. It was surprising that he’d started the conversation, but also that there seemed no malice for Mikasa in the phrase, despite the fact that it might have, if said aloud whilst emphasising her name. Alas, the disquiet of this rhetoric was almost directed at the two boys with their unclean consciences.

Unless Armin was paranoid.

“She told us some stuff. You… I don’t know Eren, I think… I think… It’d be good for you to tell us in your own words. I-If you’re comfortable with that.”

Eren took a thoughtful sip of his hot chocolate. He regarded Armin from beneath his dark lashes, which had gone clumpy with tears, and Armin held his gaze in all its rare intensity. Thinking back over the wording of his sentence made him want to kick himself, as he reflected how there were many things that made a boy with social anxiety uncomfortable that Eren still did regardless. 

_You bunked school to listen to my problems???_

“You underestimate the importance of hot chocolate here,” Jean pointed out, and Eren actually smiled. 

Watching them interact made Armin panic. He felt as if he’d missed enough signs to notice the cause of the turn in their relationship from hatred to something not unlike friendship, and that this could only lead to Armin becoming out-of-touch with Eren. He didn’t want to lose him. He especially didn’t want to lose him gradually, so that the action enforced long-term suffering yet made it so easy to forget at the same time. He was scared he’d find himself staring blankly at the four walls of his bedroom again, with no reason to move or breathe or live. If he couldn’t even gauge Eren’s reaction to some meaningless light-heartedness right, how was he to capacitate his reaction to him actually revealing his problems?

He was such a failure, he thought. In a way, it would have been good for Eren and Jean to become closer, as they could both forget Armin then. He could stop being such a burden, such an utter waste of space…

Eren put a hand tentatively on his arm to snap him out of his daze. He didn’t realise he’d been staring down at the floor, but Eren looked concerned and pointed at him before doing a slightly emphasised signing for “OK”: either for his or Jean’s benefit, he wasn’t sure. 

“I should be asking you that,” Armin sniffed, wiping his eye again. 

_I’m fine._

Armin expected Jean to say something then, but he didn’t. He stayed silent. With Eren having turned to face Armin, it was almost as if the conversation had become a private one, and Jean didn’t look like he minded.

Except, he of course wasn’t fine. Eren knew that. He tried to deny himself the right to feel that way for a good minute, just staring Armin down, waiting for something to be said to challenge this delicate world-view.

Armin, in return, stared back. He wrote numerous screenplays of the next few minutes in his head, trying to prompt himself into different conversations to see where they would lead, but essentially, all that passed between them was silence. With Eren, there was seldom much more said verbally: and it was this realisation, under the crippling pressure of the dead-weight of wordlessness, that Armin determined how to approach the next difficult conversation. 

Eren had taught him how little was said with words. Eren Jaeger, the Abitur student with selective mutism, average grades and a poor attendance record, had taught Armin something incredibly important about how people worked: that words were unimportant compared to a multitude of facial expressions, gestures, sign language, scrawly handwriting, messy diagrams, body language, a hand linked in another, a look, a touch, a kiss on his neck… 

If people were always pushing Eren to talk but to no avail, then perhaps the answer was to appease him in his own language? Or even if it wasn’t the answer as such, maybe, Armin wondered, maybe it was a step forward into Eren’s mind, a way of reaching out when he so badly needed to stop himself from falling.

It was because of this, that Armin reached out and put his hand in Eren’s.

He’d done it before. Of course they’d held hands before, they were so foolishly in love. But this time, it meant something to Eren. He looked at the end like it held in it his own beating heart, cherishing its presence and clasping it tight, lest it steal what he needed to live. 

After that, he began to write.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eren's mug was a result of Jean specifically asking the person behind the counter to do something to cheer his friend up, btw, given that this is set Oct-Nov.


	15. Primary Evidence

_Armin,_

_I don’t hate Mikasa. When we were talking last week, I don’t think I said that, even though we talked about her. It’s why I had to leave this morning, because I couldn’t say anything (haha) to her when in a way, she sort of did me a favour. I guess it would have been nicer if Horseface wasn’t there or it was less public, but I’m glad you know? I hate to admit it but I was kind of scared you’d back off, since I’m already in awe that someone like you is interested in someone like me. Jesus that probably sounds really fucking needy, gross. Sorry._

_I know Mikasa’s right about the whole speaking thing. At the end of this letter, I’m going to ask you something I want to be able to say aloud, and I’m sorry I can’t. Is it selfish to ask for you to hold out for the day I can? I will ask properly one day, I swear._

_I haven’t always not been able to speak, but I don’t remember not having problems with it. Dad (Grisha) hates it, which makes it worse I think, but when he’s not around (he’s away a lot) Mum and I try and work through it, but don’t tell Mikasa that in case she thinks I care. And yeah, Dad grew up under the Stasi and stuff so I think that’s how he thinks life should run at home. It feels like he’s watching us, which makes me nervous as fuck and means I can’t get any words out no matter how hard Mum and I try and he gets mad. That’s what you saw on my back, but Mikasa probably already said, not that she makes it any of her business because she’s plenty good enough at keeping her mouth shut at home. Then again, so am I, so who am I to talk (…none of these puns are intended I swear)._

_It’s difficult though, because she’s as scared as I am. She told me you noticed that on Friday night, which doesn’t surprise me because you’re so smart. Sometimes I think she doesn’t deserve to be scared because he never does anything to her, but then she’s a better daughter than I am a son and she isn’t even blood relation so it’s all my own fucking fault in the end._

_This is between you and me, you can tell Jean if you want but no one else. Dad uses the basement because Mum doesn’t want to question what goes on then, so he does things down there that I’ve only recently realised he shouldn’t do. It’s not just hitting, it’s other stuff like locking me down there or holding my head underwater (he used to give me cold showers but Mum told him not to). Sometimes he sits and watches me- he used to ask me questions and watch me but nowadays he just watches me for hours and I can’t go to sleep because that would annoy him and it’s letting my guard down. No day is the same and what he does depends on his mood, eg he won’t touch me if he’s in a quietly angry mood, but if he’s drunk he’s more violent etc._

_He reads my notebooks and texts too. I know that one’s my fault too because I’m so dependent on writing and he is technically allowed, since he is my Dad. Recently, weird stuff sets him off, and he gets annoyed if he knows I’ve been pulling out pages so I try to guess which will piss him off more. That’s the reason he knows nothing about you. I didn’t want him to read about you so I ripped those pages out, if you were ever wondering where our old conversations went. It may sound soppy or whatever but I didn’t want him to find out about you. You’re special, you know?_

_The hitting and other physical stuff isn’t normally the worst though, it’s more that he’s so controlling and I already said that’s why I like thinking about the fall of the Berlin Wall, because I wonder sometimes if there’s some sort of wall that still stands in our family that makes his attitude so East German. The days when it’s just me off school are the days I’m in the basement, and the other times (like this week) he won’t let us go to school because he thinks we’ll tell everyone or someone will guess. Mikasa and I just end up staying in bed, which I sometimes find nice, but mostly it’s crap, because I can’t go out and it makes me feel shit, being trapped in. That’s probably also part of the reason my wrists end up looking as they do. I didn’t used to miss school either, but I do now, you and even Jean (gross)._

_I get that there’s some stuff I need to sort out. I’m sorry you have to deal with my problems so often and I’m sorry I’m such a shitty person. I’m also sorry that I couldn’t say that to your face, which was kind of my plan when I got drunk last week. I’m sorry for getting drunk. That was shitty too._

_If it’s any consolation, I’d trade anything to not be mute. Like Franz Ehrlich, I'd trade anything to be free._

_Which leads me to my question, the one I can’t ask you in person because I’m so fucking incapable. Which is: will you date me? I think you like me in that way, or I goddamn hope so since we made out and stuff._

_Don’t feel bad if you’re not ready, I won’t stop talking to you (OK… you know what I mean) or whatever. We’ve not known each other for long, as I keep saying, but I feel like I’ve been friends with you since we were small, in a weird way, because you always know what I’m thinking and I trust you far too much._

_I guess I hope this letter doesn't change your view of me either. I don't need saving or anything, because that's what people worry about: there was a teacher in my old school who tried to report my bruises to the police, but it always backfires in that way because I couldn't say anything so they gave up trying. I just think it's an important thing to know, like why I'm off school, why I like the history of the DDR and the Berlin Wall, stuff._

_Eren_


	16. Review Primary Evidence

Armin folded the paper again, pressing the now well-worn crease between index finger and thumb. He’d been fiddling with it all afternoon. If his mum had been home, she might have told him to stop it, running her bitten nails along the worktop as he guiltily stuffed the paper into his pocket before she could ask to read it. However, she was out. He’d forgotten where, but he was sure she wasn’t going to be back until the following afternoon because there was an elongated “I” over those two dates on the calendar above the pedal bin, indicating just that.

He’d never seen himself to be someone to break rules, but maybe Eren was just such an exception. He was sat on the worktop next to the fridge, dangling his feet forlornly as Armin fiddled with the piece of paper: no friends round when Armin’s mum was out was how the rule went, and yet there he was, a living, breathing rebellion.

It was not his intention to taunt Eren with the letter. In fact, Eren seemed to understand that he was thinking, and was almost relaxed about Armin handling his secrets so casually, if not avoiding looking at the paper in favour of remaining pseudo-interested in his holey socks.

Armin knew from the way his handwriting became scribblier near the end of the letter that he had been uncomfortable writing it. Armin had tried to lean over to see what it all said, but Eren stopped and blinked at him pointedly. He wanted to write the letter in peace, so Armin conceded to this request and took Jean to order more drinks. They loitered long enough at the counter for Eren to have finished by the time he returned, handing Armin the note folded. There were simple instructions printed on the front: “READ LATER”.

This was later, he supposed, even though it was also now. 

The clock on the wall only served to emphasise the silence, a ceaseless _tick-tock, tick-tock_ eating away at Armin’s nerve. Eventually, he broke.

“D-Do you want to see my room? I-It’s a bit cosier, I dunno…” 

Eren glanced at the clock only momentarily before nodding, as if he’d made up his mind before considering the time. 

Dismounting the worktop, Armin couldn't help but notice the scowl breezing across Eren's face as he rubbed his head, pressing hard as he massaged, as if were smoothing out minute wrinkles in his skin. Armin pretended he wasn’t proud of reading Eren, as he stopped the boy just before he exited the kitchen.

“Eren, ‘ve you got a headache?”

He cocked his head, not frowning or displaying too much of a sense of surprise, yet still making himself clear enough for Armin to feel comfortable returning to the back of the kitchen and rooting through the cupboard nearest the window.

“You’ve probably not drunk enough or something, Armin muttered, and found himself blushing as he extracted a packet of Paracetamol. Eren was watching him closely, so he felt nervous, acting in small movements in case he did something wrong. Then it hit him, as he turned the packet over- weren’t pills the most common way of committing suicide?

He decided to give Eren the choice, in order to stop himself panicking about doing something wrong with his own judgement or patronising Eren, who came across as relatively alright, considering the events of the morning.

“Are you OK with…?” He held the box up. It was probably telling of his nerves to leave the question hanging, but Eren didn’t appear to mind. He understood that silence was a language in itself, and of course returned the question in much the same way, saying nothing as he took the packet from Armin’s hand. 

Armin poured a glass of water from the tap, making an effort not to watch Eren as his fingers shook over the blisters of pills, yet all the same remained aware of what he was doing by the noise. Alas, he handed the packet back after extracting two pills, and downed them with an unnerving sense of ease, as if he’d done it too many times before. It figured, Armin supposed: he didn’t expect to be wrong in that kind of assumption. 

After this, Armin led him through into his room, gesturing his hands round the bland walls and moderate disorganisation apologetically. The tension eased as Armin turned to see Eren wearing a sort of half-grin, amused by how quintessentially Armin this space in the world was, down to such fine details as the way his books were ordered both by language and alphabetically, and the pink kitten-printed blanket folded neatly next to a textbook on Japanese imperialism at the foot of his bed. The environment itself, however, made him nervous, unsure of how to act in what Armin later identified as one of their first moments of proper privacy. 

Armin was tentative in moving towards Eren. He wasn’t used to making the first move. Well, maybe in this case it wasn’t technically the first move, given that Eren had just asked him out: something he was still mulling over as he stroked the hair from the taller boy’s forehead. 

It wasn’t as if he didn’t want to date him. He did, very much so; even Jean could see that and he wasn’t entirely sure he’d ever made it explicitly clear that those were his real feelings. The problem more was the way Eren had gone about doing it: not the fact that it was a letter, that was expected, but tagging it onto the end of a serious confession about his home life and the possible source of his mental health problems. Foreshadowing the question at the start of the letter made the confession itself, in narrative terms, come across as filler, as if undervalued in importance to Eren himself. Did he not realise the gravitas of telling him what he had? Armin couldn’t have been the first person Eren had told, but then it was hard to believe the last person wouldn’t have taken issue with the way Eren made jokes about his own abuse in a horribly detached way. It made Armin uncomfortable when parts of the letter had been used by Eren to deride himself while holding Armin in such high-esteem: too high an esteem, if Armin had a say. So while Armin may have wanted to go out with Eren, he couldn’t if I was still attached to concepts of self-hatred, abuse and secrecy.

While Armin had been gathering up his thoughts, Eren had become more comfortable. A realisation that it was just the two of them in a room with not much beside a bed and silence dawned on them, and they neared each other; whether intentionally or not, Armin couldn’t tell. It was intuition, like in films, where love was scripted and rehearsed so there was no awkwardness or self-doubt. 

“Eren.” His name was like an insult: slipping so easily off the tongue and hard to take back. Eren’s reaction was somewhat startling, because Armin hadn’t really thought about why he’d said it; yet there the boy was, attentive, blinking down at him with those eyes of his.

“Mm?” was Eren’s short reply, which made Armin wonder about working hard enough to gain Eren’s trust and whether it would build a verbal bridge of sorts. It was difficult.

“You need to know,” he breathed, “That you’re worth exactly the same to me whether you can speak or not. Same should go for everyone else, but you know it’s a lie if I tell you people think like that.”

Eren looked like he didn’t want to have this conversation, and made no effort to try to hide this fact. It was something he needed to know though, Armin was sure of that. The difficult bit came, as ever, when he came to thinking about what Mikasa thought: the frustrations of trying to get Eren to speak to defend himself and make his life easier in other ways. Where was the line? Where did encouraging him to speak suddenly start eating away at his self-esteem to have pushed him to where he was now?

Armin broke the gaze. He looked down, his attention coming to rest on Eren’s wrists again, and it was then that he realised that he was getting it wrong. He’d been constantly so worried about being able to put a moral compass on each and every thought and emotion that he’d forgotten that real-life was not textbook. There was a grey-area. Nothing with Eren was black and white, so what kind of person was he for letting an under-educated view of mental health to have him see Eren’s problems as having some kind of switch he could turn off? Eren had said he’d not always been mute, so it had a progression, and he could speak at certain times and to certain people, meaning it had variables. His anxiety worked in the same way. 

Ergo, there was no simple solution. 

Armin’s conclusions were cut short by one impatient Eren, who could definitely tell that Armin intended to extend the conversation and blocked this notion with a kiss, cupping Armin’s cheeks shyly as he moved with a minimal amount of force. It was delicate. Too delicate, in fact, to achieve what Armin knew he was trying to achieve, and he broke it off in frustration.

“See, why… Why do you do that? You treat me so well… And… You treat me so well but you treat yourself like you don’t care, why?”

Eren’s composure changed, and he gave Armin a moment to appreciate this, before shoving him violently backwards, where he landed on the bed. He wondered if he’d gone too far when Eren pinned him down a second later, but instead of exerting any more force, he used the space above Armin’s head to scrawl something on a pad of sticky notes Armin recognised as his own; Eren had picked them up from his desk. 

At least the conversation he’d intended having was happening.

_I’ve told you what I needed to tell you, why keep on?_

“That’s not how it works, Eren. If we’re going to go out, then I’m allowed to ask questions. What, do you think we can have a healthy relationship if you don’t love yourself as much as you do me? That’s dependency, and it sort of invalidates my loving you back because you’ll constantly be wondering if I’m genuine because you don’t believe I should feel the way I do.”

The last post-it was ripped off and discarded on the bed. He didn’t waste time scrunching or throwing it; he was right on to writing the next note.

 _If you don’t want to date, just say ffs._

“It’s not about that either,” Armin raised his voice, “Would you just listen? Look, I have a confession too, OK? Mikasa talked to me when we first met, and she asked me to help you because she knew I liked you. A-And although I’m not really sure what I think of Mikasa anymore, I don’t know if it’s right going out with you unless you’re prepared to open up? Do you think it’s fair for me to have to date someone who might commit suicide at any minute?”

_Don’t damn bother then, I’m sorry I come with baggage._

Armin felt cruel. Maybe he was being cruel, yet he couldn’t seem to hold himself back.

“Yet you’re still here.” 

Armin predicted the reaction that line might have, and as Eren dismounted Armin, Armin swung his right-leg up to catch Eren exactly where it hurt, before grabbing him as he doubled-over in pain and turning the tables, becoming the one to pin Eren to the bed. It was somewhat less secure, considering the fact that Eren was the stronger one by far and kept trying to curl up before he overcame the worst of the pain. Armin could rest his weight between sitting on Eren’s thighs and holding his shoulders down.

The contact probably had something to do with Armin letting so much go all at once.

“Eren dammit, you know I don’t mean it that way. I have no intention of letting your dad do what he does to you! Can’t you see that part of his game is to try to make you believe that you don’t have the right to be angry about the way you’re treated? He doesn’t want to get found out, so he makes you believe you deserve it, he makes you think you shouldn’t tell people or you should downplay it like you’ve done to me. I don’t care if you hate me for making a big deal out of it, I’m terrified of what will happen if I don’t and this goes on. I don’t pretend I can change anything completely but I’m not worth you if I can’t at least try to make you see that you deserve more, and if you can’t recognise that this needs to change yourself then- E-E-Eren? Wait, I’m sorry, a-are you OK?” 

Armin’s rant came to a quick end as he descended from his rage to see Eren struggling beneath him. There were tears streaming involuntarily down his face, and guilt hit Armin like a wave when he loosened his grip and Eren shot up off the bed, twisting his torso to be able to look away from Armin while at the same time grabbing his back to hold himself upright, since Armin was still on his lap.

It was sobering for Armin to realise that in his anger against that exact thing, he’d forgotten the damage Grisha had already done, even looking straight at Eren’s purple lip for the past few hours. 

“Eren,” he breathed, “Eren, I’m sorry.”

There might have been another reason behind the way Eren was so quick to scrub away the tears from his eyes with the heel of his hand, but in that moment, it made perfect sense as nothing more than a depiction of how exactly Eren’s system of self-denial worked. 

“This is… Uh…” He paused, contemplating his next words carefully, rolling them between his tongue and teeth to see how they tasted before letting them slip out, “Can I see?”

It was hard to gauge Eren’s reaction from the back of his head, but Eren went still when he realised what Armin meant. Armin couldn’t help but inhale, waiting. He stared at the back of Eren’s neck next to his own shoulder, following his hair as it ended in an overgrown lick, and where his jumper started one could just about see the discolouring of his dark skin. 

After what felt like an eternity, Eren let his hand drop from holding onto Armin’s back and pushed him off his lap, Armin providing no resistance this time as he fell onto the floor. He momentarily thought Eren was going to get up and leave, and Armin found himself perplexed by whether, in this case, he ought to follow him or not. However, Eren’s staring at the door was but a rouse, if not him avoiding Armin’s gaze. He pulled his jumper over his head, flicking the sleeves angrily off, before removing his t-shirt more tenderly, prudent as he brushed the material over the nape of his neck.

Armin didn’t touch the bruises. Seeing Eren as he lowered his t-shirt from in front of his torso, with the bruises on his back, the cuts on his wrists, the split lip and a nasty looking scar just below his sternum that Armin had not seen before hit it home as to why Eren was filled with such ferocious and ceaseless anger. 

He didn’t like to look at them. He wasn’t sure if that made him a bad person or not but seen as it was making Eren uncomfortable, he felt inclined to tell him to put his shirt back on. That, however, was before Eren raised his head to look at Armin, and Armin watched his eyes flicker between quiet anger and vulnerability before switching to something much softer, the angles of his eyebrows relaxing as he scanned Armin’s face.

Before Armin could find his tongue to say something, Eren reached forward and slipped his hand up Armin’s jumper. His hands were still cold from being outside, so Armin gave an involuntary jerk when they made contact with his skin, and Eren cracked what felt like the first smile in a good while that was both genuine and reserved purely for Armin.

Breaking the tension made Eren more sure in the way he moved. He straightened himself out so his torso was no longer at an angle from Armin, and pulled him in, all the while sliding his icy hands up Armin’s back. It was only when it was too late that Armin realised his top-half was being stripped, and he blushed salmon as he found his chubby torso exposed in front of a semi-naked Eren.

“E-E-E-Eren…!” Again, it seemed surreal, if not wrong, that Eren had been able to manipulate the situation to one focusing on their relationship rather than taking Eren’s bruises to hand. Then again, if Eren distracted himself enough to be able to display his various injuries without wearing the expression of violation he had been only moment earlier, then perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing. 

If Armin had been face-to-face with Jean in a similar situation as he was in with Eren right then, they might have fucked. Not at all because Armin particularly wanted sex (in fact, quite the opposite) or anything to do with how he felt about either of the boys, it was merely that Jean was much brasher than Eren. Eren couldn’t even instigate a kiss without Armin seeing it coming by the way his facial expression changed a few moments before, yet it was still hopelessly romantic having Eren subtly look for his approval before taking another baby step.

The last thing Armin remembered was them pushing each other gently under the bedcovers, and Eren stroking his face, wearing a sort of tired smile. It might have been five minutes or five hours that he lay there in in front of Eren, considering the boy he really ought to have avoided falling in love with and telling himself that they never should have ended up like this. There was tragedy in the way Eren lay on his front and placed his phone face-down on Armin’s dresser; and in the way Armin couldn’t help but wonder if life could actually work out this way, or if everything with Eren and finally feeling something was all just temporary, something he fed himself to blind him of the mind-numbing sameness of reality.

Being one to play roulette with his sleeping pattern, Armin was used to slipping into the abyss of sleep for a long time and awaking in slight confusion as to the time of day and his plans. However, he and Eren had returned barely before 4pm, leaving Jean at the station, and arguing couldn’t have taken them that long. When Armin realised he was on the brink of sleep, he assumed it would be a nap, and that when they awoke it would be dark, and he’d feel empty as he’d walk Eren home through the cold streets of Berlin. There would be no smile and certainly no kiss as they waved goodbye and Armin would watch Eren leave, standing in a black puddle that soaked his worn shoes and made his feet squelch on the walk home, as the only noise to accompany his melancholy.

It was not to be. Whether tired because of a lack of sleep or tired because of the toll life took on them, the two boys slept through the evening, neither waking from hunger or from the presence of the other, not until the next morning. 

Armin was the first to wake. This would have been nice if he could enjoy Eren’s sleeping face: the slight frown even when all his features seemed relaxed and the trail of saliva down one cheek. Howeverm he was by no means at all used to having Eren in his bed, so it what somewhat terrifying as well as sweet, finding the other boy’s arm draped over his bare stomach. And then, of course, there was the reason Armin suspected he awoke in the first place, once he’d remembered the events of the previous day: there was someone moving about in the hall.

“Erennn!” he whispered, turning to stroke his cheek, before suddenly resorting to poking him hard, “Hide, my mother’s home!”

Armin was glad Eren didn’t ask questions, disappearing under the covers and pressing his body as close as possible to Armin’s, while one slender arm reached out and threw his backpack under the bed. Armin just had time to gather up the post-its still at the foot of the bed and shove them under his pillow before the footsteps headed for his door. 

“Hello?” a voice called out, and Armin did a double take. It wasn’t his mother, was it? It didn’t sound like her. He wondered what he was going to say, explaining still being in bed at nearly 8am on a school day. Perhaps he slept in? He decided on this, feigning sleep while pressing on hand on Eren’s head, feeling the heat of his breath on his torso. 

“Armin?” came the voice again, except this time it was a young male. Armin’s eyes snapped open just as the door went, and nearly leapt out of bed in surprise at the two people who had somehow entered the flat and were now staring down at him in shock.

“Shit,” was all Armin could manage, and thankfully it came out sounding groggy. He blinked a few times, partially to fake the disorientation he’d been feeling genuinely a few moments earlier, while partially also out of bewilderment.

“I could say the same thing, you’re going to be late,” Jean squinted at him. 

“W-W-What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

“You wouldn’t answer your calls last night,” Mikasa told him matter-of-factly.

“The door was unlocked, sorry. Look, Eren’s gone missing after yesterday,” Jean elaborated, and Armin’s stomach dropped as he realised how easily they had both slid into trouble. “H-He came back with you, didn’t he? Did he say anything?”

Eren was pinching his leg under the covers. He wasn’t sure what it was supposed to mean, but given that he hadn’t revealed himself, it seemed they were planning to worm their way out of this one. Instantly, Armin started planning in his head, tactics and escape routes streaming through his consciousness.

“E-E-Eren’s gone missing?” He stammered from nerves, but neither of them seemed to take it that way. He supposed he (thankfully) wasn’t a suspect; Eren obviously made a habit of this.

In order for this to work, he thought, he had to stall. He had to think of something to ask, which would make him sound genuine, then think of a way to have them go ahead so he and Eren could sort something out, even if it was just for them to get dressed and Eren to find somewhere better to hide. 

He sat up slightly, but kept as much of below his neck covered, as Jean would find it suspicious that he wasn’t wearing pyjamas to bed.

Mikasa was staring at him.

“D-Did you inform the police?”

It was a genuine question, Armin wanting to test the water to see if Eren would come clean on his own with enough probing. However, he didn’t get an answer. His heart slowed as he watched Mikasa’s gaze slide to his left and upon seeing the recognition in her eyes, he remembered Eren’s phone on his bedside table. 

That was it. The game was up, and it was déjà vu and slow motion rolled into one action as Mikasa stepped forward and, with a force unnatural for her size, ripped back the covers to reveal Eren cringing next to an Armin whose jeans had slipped off a bit.

“Oh my fucking god, what the ever-loving fuck…” Jean gawped. The rage dawning on Mikasa’s face seemed a bit extreme to Armin, who still half-asleep forgot only he and Eren knew what had gone on the afternoon before: that was, before he looked at Jean’s positively scandalised expression and realised exactly what it looked like.

The ironic thing was they could have done whatever they wanted to after their argument and because they wouldn’t have fallen asleep, Eren would have made it home on time and no-one would have been any the wiser; yet here they were, being incriminated for something they hadn’t even felt they wanted to do. Neither were in a state to defend themselves either, both far too shocked at having their friends find them in such a fashion. Time felt as if it had finally given up and at the crucial moment, he and Eren were left hanging in eternity, terrified out of their skins at the burning malice emanating from Mikasa’s hard glower.

It was Jean, much to Armin’s surprise, who came to the rescue.

“Mikasa, this can wait. Go outside so they can get dressed, or we’re going to be late.” He then steered her out the door and closed it with a definite click, before turning away himself upon realising Eren didn’t intend to uncover himself with the duvet he’d pulled up for modesty moments after it’d been ripped of him. 

“Go on, hurry up,” Jean said out of the corner of his mouth. Not being able to see his face, Armin began to panic upon hearing a hint of irritation in his voice. His cheeks were a strong peach colour as he scrambled out of bed, throwing Eren his clothes. It didn’t help that his jumper was on the other side of the room from how viciously he’d thrown it off; Armin supposed there was little use trying to explain themselves. Although nothing had happened, it wasn’t as if the night had been devoid of intimacy: on the contrary, it had been beautiful being so close to Eren for such a long time, particularly as all the anxiety left Eren completely when he was asleep, allowing them to become as close as they were when they awoke, and for Eren to not have panicked so much when startled by Armin. Or was Armin being overly attached? It’s not as if Eren had intended to stay. 

In the moment where the room was obscured from his vision as he pulled his sweater over his head, he remembered Eren’s letter and what it had asked of him. He’d still not said whether they were dating or not, even though he’d let the “L” word go already. Did he have a choice not to formalise it, since the relationship appeared it would go ahead regardless?

The first thing he saw when he cleared the hair from his eyes was Eren hissing quietly as he pulled the jumper over the tender skin of his back.

“Your dad’s going to be mad,” Armin thought aloud. He hadn’t meant to say it; it just slipped out. Eren clearly had yet to consider it though, and his face fell.

“No shit,” Jean said, although he probably wouldn’t have been if he could see the expression on Eren’s face.

“Shut up Jean, now’s not the time,” Armin snapped, grabbing his schoolbag from the foot of his bed. Eren wasn’t moving, but Armin felt uncomfortable going to comfort him when there was so much tension in the room.

“You should have thought of the time when you decided to fuck ea-”

“We didn’t have sex!” Armin shouted far too loudly, his voice breaking a little so it came out rather squeaky, almost hysterical. Eren jumped.

“Yeah, so Eren just-”

“Jean, you don’t need to turn around anymore,” Armin interrupted. Jean acquiesced, pivoting on his heel to face them. It had the effect Armin had been hoping for, as Jean realised his mistake, looking between the two of them: the abject sense of doom about Eren and the innocence and indignance in the way Armin was regarding him. Armin could see him slotting the pieces together, and he looked at Armin for consolidation.

“Would I lie to you?” Armin tested. 

Jean turned his attention towards Eren. 

“Eren… We made a deal, right?” he asked, and when Eren nodded, he flipped his head back in frustration, clawing at his eyes with his knuckles before sighing heavily. “Jesus fucking Christ, you two… What the fuck happened then? Go on, explain, I wanna goddamn shitting hear this.”

“We fell asleep when we got back.”

“What, I don’t remember you being in any state of undress when I left you…”

“OK, we had an argument and there was cuddling but… nothing else, I-I swe-”

The front door slammed, and Jean and Armin started.

“Did Mikasa just leave?” Armin asked, and was surprised to see Eren grab his bag and his phone upon this suggestion and leap over the unmade bed. Indeed, Armin and Jean followed suit, Armin almost tripping over his own feet as he struggled to keep up and find he keys simultaneously, but Jean hung back, keeping an eye on both of them like a concerned parent for the 10 seconds Armin took fumbling with the lock. Once it was done, they tore down the stairs, and Armin heard the door go twice in quick succession.

He’d expected something when they spilt out into the street, but he wasn’t sure about Mikasa almost getting hit by a car. The car didn’t stop, but by some fluke managed to swerve clear of her as she walked into the road. Jean held Armin’s shoulder tightly as they watched Eren grab her arm and pull her back onto the pavement. The moment wherein Mikasa was too dazed to notice what was happening and the one where Eren wore and uncharacteristic look of confidence and protectiveness was alas short-lived, as Mikasa regained her senses and ripped her hand from Eren’s grip.

Armin briefly considered staying in the doorway. He didn’t, and he would tell himself this was because he felt culpable in the argument, when really, he just didn’t want to miss what was going on.

Mikasa kept walking, a steaming pace forcing Eren to jog to keep up with her as he tried to appease her. Armin couldn’t help but remember the rage she’d unleashed the previous morning, and prayed she would come to her senses before pouring such vitriol over Eren while he was already being taunted with the punishment due that evening. Mikasa was normally so reserved and Eren, despite his anger, was quiet and often vulnerable, so it made no sense that they clashed in such a violent fashion like this.

Eren was desperately trying to sign something to Mikasa, but she flicked him off of ignored him, infuriating him. Armin could see Eren struggling to stay calm, balling up his fists in frustration while biting his lip. Eventually, after about thirty seconds of this, Eren lost it. He threw his bag at her, and although it wasn’t a direct hit, it caught her heavily enough in the shoulder for her to retaliate. 

Armin was pumping with fear and adrenaline as he watched Jean leap between them, caught up in their grappling. While taller than both of them, Mikasa was easily the strongest, while Eren had the most balled up anger that made him ferocious, if not animalistic. Although he didn’t specifically remember seeing anyone looking over, he knew people were staring. 

Jean was focusing more on Eren by this point, who was taking the fight far too far. He seemed to have lost his mind, ceaseless in his efforts to get at Mikasa despite the fact she’d obviously already exploited his weak points from the blood trickling down his left arm. His expression was terrifying. He wasn’t stopping, even when Mikasa started to show signs of surfacing from her own bout of fury.

Armin made a move when Jean was finally expulsed from the fight by his own fault, tripping on a crack in the pavement and whirling his arms to regain his balance in a way that would have been comical had it not been for the seriousness of the situation. He was raring to go and pull the two away from each other, to get things sorted out the way he liked to, but the instead he found himself being mocked by stars that appeared in front of his eyes Eren’s elbow collided with his face.

He’d never been unconscious before, not in living memory. It wasn’t how it happened in films: he didn’t close his eyes and he didn’t realise what had happened until he had to compute staring up at three faces, all with various levels of guilt tinging their cheeks.

“Armin man, you really get dragged into this sort of thing, huh?”

“Don’t absolve him from guilt,” Mikasa argued.

“Guilt?” Jean asked flippantly, “What for?”

Armin sat himself up a bit, and when Eren saw him struggling, he came over to help. Armin resisted a bit, not sure how he felt about the rampant, illogical version of Eren he’d encountered moments earlier, but acquiesced when he saw Eren’s sorrow spreading like butter on hot toast across his face.

“He tried to hide Eren when I thought he was missing.”

“And what, you’re guilt-free, are you? Everyone here knows what yesterday was about.”

Eren stiffened. 

“That’s why I was worried.”

And then Armin saw it. She’d defended her actions so vehemently the morning before, and perpetuated by the hurt she’d caused Eren and by being unable to talk her through when she wasn’t emotional, Armin had crafted a one-sided picture of Mikasa. Yet, when she was knelt next to him, watched by four teenagers, and she lowered her gaze and stared at her lap, he could tell that as ever he’d gotten the wrong end of the stick: indeed, the most steadfast way to use a stick was to grasp it firmly at the centre. 

Mikasa’s overreaction had been a result of something neither Jean nor Armin could appreciate fully: this wasn’t a one-off, this was part of Eren’s string of self-destruction which Mikasa was on the receiving end of whether she wanted to be or not. There were purple shadows under her eyes. How long had she sat awake last night, wondering if Eren had ended himself and indeed, if she was the cause? How many times had this fragile girl had to wait for news about her reckless adoptive brother, knees-locked, picking her knuckles as she blinked away tears? Was a violent fight like this, where she’d scratch at his cuts and he’d lash out uncontrollably, always how they dealt with it?

“I’m sorry,” Armin said, and took her hand, “W-We really didn’t mean it, it just… happened. S-Sleeping, I mean, w-we didn’t do anything.”

Mikasa stared at him. It wasn’t a judgemental stare, or one trying to suss him out or decide whether he was lying like Jean had. She was tired.

Eren did a gesture Armin barely caught out of the corner of his eye. It took him a moment to identify it as sign language, and although he couldn’t tell what he was saying, it was quite obviously directed towards Mikasa. 

Letting go of Armin’s hand, Mikasa sighed. She took Eren in for a moment: a boy in all his glory with yesterday’s clothes, a half-open rucksack, blood trickling down his wrist and a healing split-lip. The she turned away, looking back towards the flat, and round to the broken fountain on the opposite side of the road. Eren looked hurt when she did this.

“You can speak sign language, Eren?” Jean butted in, and Armin started at the sound of his voice: Eren and Mikasa were both knelt at his side, but Jean was stood behind him so he’d almost forgotten he was there. Eren nodded slightly, before cocking his head and pulling a face, suggesting he was patchy, as in most of his subjects. Armin didn’t suppose anyone would have been too engaged in helping him learn, except, by the sounds of it, his mother. 

“He speaks a bit of Japanese too… Well, the word “speak” used lightly,” Mikasa added, and the last bit was ignored by everyone except Eren, who even then only flinched at the sharpness in her voice. 

“Wait… Do you speak sign language and Japanese, Mikasa?” Armin tried to engage her.

“Japanese is my mother tongue. Eren teaches me a bit of sign language sometimes, but he knows more.”

“We should learn,” Jean professed, and when everyone was slow to catch on, he elaborated, “We should all learn sign language! I mean, not just for Eren’s sake, there are plenty of people around school who could… yeah. Uh. It must be pretty pointless being the only person who knows it, right?” 

“I don’t think Eren should teach,” Armin pointed out, and Eren frowned jokingly. It was strange not having resolved the tension from the still undiscussed fight yet still be making light, and Armin kept glancing at Mikasa to check her reactions as Jean got his plan off the ground.

“We live in Berlin, there must be one around for fucks sake,” Jean said matter-of-factly. 

Eren nodded, unsure at first, but seeing Armin smiling so warmly at him, the thought of being able to hold paper-less conversations with him manifesting in a sort of sunny optimism that radiated from his very being, he gradually began to come round to the idea. He looked up at Jean and gave him a knowing look, Armin remembering how Jean had mentioned “a deal” back in the flat. 

Was this what the start of an idiosyncratic friendship looked like?


	17. Method

“It’s a good idea, then?” Jean asked, leaning over his desk, grinning widely. Eren looked over from the other side of the room, and Jean saw Armin smile back, to which Eren visibly blushed. His turning back to look at the board gave Armin the opportunity to answer Jean’s question, though he kept one lovesick, if not concerned eye on Eren as the lesson got rolling.

“What, sign language? It was great.”

“I’m proud of it, as an idea. And… I’m going to make things up to you, y’know,” he avowed suddenly, and Armin raised his eyebrows.

“What for? You were already great to Eren yesterday, y-you nearly put me to shame,” he chuckled. Guilt was a fresh wave of sentiment, like a bucket of cold water, and for a moment, his senses were on fire. Jean rolled his eyes.

“Last time I checked, you and Eren aren’t the same person,” he huffed. “I… I’m sorry about yesterday, after the… incident. I feel like I’m losing you, and I don’t know what came over me.”

He tried not to think about it. It made him squirm now, thinking of Jean in the same way he thought of Eren. Jean wasn’t that. Jean had most likely been in shock. Of course, the incident had probably also been reflective of Jean’s genuine feelings, but there was no doubt he would have held back if it weren’t for the way Mikasa and Eren’s clash had rattled them, Eren’s vulnerability becoming infectious as the pair of them became aware of how helpless they were in the midst of life itself.

The discussion right then may have begun with them discussing sign language, and indeed, it wouldn’t have looked suspicious from Eren’s point of view on the other side of the classroom. And yet, Jean’s mind was elsewhere, just like Armin’s. He was staring, frowning into mid-air: the sort of expression for when one remembered something they’d rather not be reminded of, made all the more frustrating by the fact that thinking about how terrible it was only prolonged the reflection on the event.

Only moments before they’d entered the classroom (just in time), Armin had dutifully wound Eren’s cuts up in a bandage. Those bruises on his back, too, were fresh in his mind’s eye, and Mikasa’s sulking was like a reminder that Eren was being taunted with going home at the end of the day and facing a whole weekend of his father’s “punishment”. That was Eren’s life. Learning sign language wasn’t quite what Armin might consider a guise or a distraction, but perhaps he was optimistic. He might call it a mechanism. 

Or, if he were feeling hopeful, then it was a consolation.

“I might regret saying this,” Armin muttered, but kept his voice high to imply he wasn’t annoyed, “But I understand a bit where it came from. Yesterday. J-Just don’t tell Eren what happened, OK?”

Jean looked towards the front of the class, not answering. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to avoid the promising anything or if he just wanted to look like he was paying attention, but either way, the slight grimace didn’t leave his face, his lips remaining in a tight line. 

Armin didn’t want to ask about what had gone on between Jean and Eren particularly, because knowing the pair of them it would be something questionable. Perhaps Jean was manipulating Eren to win Armin over (or similar), but it was more likely, considering Jean’s reference to a “deal”, something of mutual benefit. Eren couldn’t have warmed to Jean really… Could he? Jean certainly seemed to be making an extra effort, possibly, Armin considered, going too far by actively trying to improve Eren’s quality of life. 

He pulled his gaze from Jean as he noticed someone had been watching him staring, and instead looked blankly down at his notes. He’d written the date at the top but didn’t remember doing so. The handwriting was wonkier than usual: Armin tended to have very standard, if not sometimes loopy handwriting, aside for the idiosyncrasy of crossing his sevens. Clearly tiredness was taking a toll on his penmanship. Except, Armin remembered, he wasn’t tired- he and Eren had slept perfectly through the previous afternoon and night. Had he been telling himself this daily lie to excuse himself from minor slip-ups, he wondered? Or was he misidentifying the feeling he thought was tiredness?

He didn’t care. He flicked a rubber shaving moodily, and his mind slipped back to Eren and the events of the previous day.

The story hadn’t come up about Eren running away and staying out all night much on their brisk walk into school, but it had been implied enough that this happened often enough. After all, he’d gathered no one had called the police. How did it make Eren feel to know that he could possibly disappear forever into the beat of the city, and for no-one to begin to worry enough to call the police for potentially a few days? Was it liberating, heart-breaking, a dull reality, or something that taunted him as he clung to the quotidian and safety of his miserable life: that it really wasn’t worth much at all, him being there?

Armin recalled the evening the week previously when Eren had come to his door, on that dark Monday evening. Armin had never gotten to the bottom of what had happened there, since Eren had been off the following day, but the split-lip must have had something to do with it, without a doubt. It seemed as though it appeared in a dream or a vision, his memories focusing only on how Eren’s eyes looked and the way his shoes scraped when he sprinted off, rather than remembering the action of answering the door or considering his words in front of Eren. It was so obvious in retrospect that it made Armin wonder how much detail he was missing in the world. 

Life had become less dull since he’d fallen in love with Eren, but was that a good thing? Things may not have been grey anymore, but perhaps it was because they’d become blood red, or eyestrain colours that cluttered his vision and made his head swirl in confusion as a horrific acid trip was splattered across his reality. Eren was garish Technicolour, 90s websites, black bile after jello-shots. 

Or was he?

It wasn’t as if Eren had pretended he was something else. Before they even met, Eren was problem boy: the one Jean took an instant disliking to, whom Armin didn’t want to interfere with through the way his eyebrows were constantly knitted together in something akin to anger (now what Armin might have called frustration). Then it was self-harm, mutism, a complicated family, social anxiety, a questionable relationship with alcohol and an abusive father.

He felt sick thinking about it. 

The second most important thing on Eren’s mind, however, wasn’t anything to do with his own troubles. In fact, Jean pointed out at one point that Eren seemed unusually upbeat, and Armin quite dejected in comparison: a comment Armin couldn’t disagree with. Eren’s wrists were obviously sore by the way he held them away from the edge of the table, but this didn’t stop him sitting close to Armin at lunch as he chewed vacantly on a sandwich, scribbling away in his notebook. After all, Mikasa wasn’t there to stop him: she was sat two benches away, pretending she wasn’t watching Eren’s every move with an air of rejection.

Armin knew what Eren wanted. He hadn’t forgotten the question weaved into his letter; rather, it was playing on his mind, being the problem that affected him rather than just Eren. And of course, Eren was positively pining, which wasn’t at all like him. Suddenly, the boy with social anxiety was invading Armin’s personal space. Suddenly, the boy who had every page of his notebook scrutinised was writing reams about every topic imaginable, causing Jean to squint at his over-enthusiastic scribbly handwriting.

Armin didn’t know what Eren was trying to prove. Jean seemed a little put off too, but could barely find a moment to take issue with anything, instead resorting to facial expressions that, had they have been written down like Eren’s thoughts were, would have been in parenthesis.

“Armin, are you sure you two didn’t do anything last night?” Jean could finally spit out, once Eren finally prised himself Armin to go to the toilet. Armin didn’t answer straight away: he wanted to watch Eren, as well as watch how Mikasa reacted to him leaving. The answer wasn’t too interesting: Eren did become nervous as he neared the crowd at the door to the canteen, but one of them noticed- possibly recognised- him and let him through with a sufficient amount of space that he wasn’t spooked. Mikasa, meanwhile, made a point of not looking up.

“He asked me out,” Armin admitted. He wasn’t telling Jean this to gratify him on investing himself in Eren and Armin’s relationship; he just wanted to get it off his chest. 

“No way,” Jean punched him in the arm, “You kept that one quiet.” He paused. “I wondered why his hands were all over you.” 

“He’s not _all over me_ ,” Armin said defensively, but was decidedly unsure of whom exactly he was defending. 

Jean stated the obvious, “Dude, he’s normally anxious as fuck or ready to break someone’s arm, you spend the night together apparently doing nothing and suddenly he’s changed?” 

“OK, two things Jean,” Armin fumed, “Seriously, we did not have sex. You’re just making me nervous. Secondly, that’s kind of rich coming from you: you and Eren have obviously done something behind my back, you keep being… b-being pally with each other, all of a sudden.” Jean opened his mouth to protest, and Armin had to admit, he’d outlined two things, but he carried on nonetheless. He was in the swing of it, after all, and it wasn’t often he got to speak his mind. “Not to mention, you’re forgetting other factors here- Mikasa’s not here, right?”

“Yeah, she’s over there,” Jean pointed, and Armin slapped his finger down with and air of irritation, as if swatting a fly. He almost instantly felt bad, but didn’t make a show of it.

“Mikasa’s still annoyed with him? And since Eren stayed over last night… Oh god, it’s all my fault,” he squeaked, finally coming to a stop as he slumped over his lunch. 

“What? Jesus Armin, since he stayed over… what? Are you going to date him or not?”

“N-No, I mean…” Armin frowned, “Eren’s going to be in trouble when he goes home… You know what I mean, don’t make me say it.” 

“Oh.” 

There was a short silence, as Jean stared at the table, and Armin picked at his nails, glancing at the door.

“What did that letter say?” he asked quietly, after a few moments of reflection. Armin’s muted blue eyes came up to meet Jean’s, holding his gaze with a firmness that unnerved Jean slightly.

“You should probably read it,” Armin mumbled, “I mean… His dad blackmails him, emotionally manipulates him, on top of the other stuff… I-I think you need to read it, there’s a bit I’m not sure about. I-I don’t think Eren’s the best person to discuss it, if that sounds w-weird…”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… I mean, he sort of jokes about it. It’s obvious he doesn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t think he realises what’s normal and what’s not. L-Like he keeps talking about East Germany and what affect it has on his family, but it’s… Everyone knows people have had their Stasi files opened only to find they themselves informed on someone without even remembering it, because of how saturating the regime could be on a person’s mind... A-As in, Eren doesn’t realise that he’s not immune to this regime of control his dad is probably running. He thinks he knows what he can tell me but he doesn’t, in the same way he thinks his mother’s innocent and Mikasa… Well, he empathises with her, but he doesn’t suggest that she might be being controlled too, through not questioning what he does to Eren. I know you disagree with me,” Armin said quickly, before Jean could interrupt, “But read the letter and you’ll understand that Eren doesn’t fully comprehend everything. I-I was thinking about it before, and it’s stupid to think Mikasa is just immune from this stuff. Sometimes she… says… things which don’t add up.”

“It’s subtle,” Jean added, neither as a question nor a statement. He looked up, “Eren.”

Eren indeed was making his way back over to their table. His face was visibly gloomier again, and when he sat down, he didn’t acknowledge Armin and Jean in the same way, or move close to Armin. In fact, he barely paid him any attention at all, as if he could tell Jean had been making snide remarks about the interactions.

Armin was just about to ask Eren, rather wanly, whether he was OK, when Jean piped up.

“Yo, Eren, if Mikasa’s not talking to you, do you wanna walk home with me and Armin later?”

_I’m fine by myself for today._

Armin wondered how Jean knew he wasn’t planning to tag along with them (which, Armin had to admit, he’d just assumed would happen, even though he hadn’t considered if it would work the same if Mikasa wasn’t there), before Eren began writing something else.

_I have something to do after school._

It was this that came as a surprise to Armin. Eren wasn’t in any school clubs, and he stayed out of trouble just enough to avoid detention, so together with the fact that Armin knew Eren only had one friend group, it seemed strange that Eren would have something to do. What was he planning?

Under the table, Jean’s knee knocked into his. Eren was too busy staring at the other side of the room to notice Armin look up at Jean, for Jean to return it with a grimace and a nod in Eren direction, indicating that whatever Jean’s plan was, it was imperative that Eren should walk home with them. 

“Are you in trouble after yesterday?” Armin asked timidly, and Eren didn’t even look at him as he shook his head. “What is it then?”

_Just some work, nothing interesting._ He signed it off with a little scribbly underline, as if the statement was unquestionable, that sat in harsh contrast to the notations above, littered with smiley-faces and imaginative punctuation. Something had either happened at the toilet or being taken out of the social situation had given him time to reflect. Indeed, had it not have been for the sudden vehemence for avoiding the pair of them after school and the only thing Armin had to go off was his attitude change, he might have suspected the onset of a panic attack. But this… This was Eren suddenly deciding he didn’t want their company. Why?

He had a funny feeling Jean had been right to contest it.

“We can wait for you?” 

Eren shook his head, and Armin could see him becoming irate. He had to end the discussion before he took it too far and made Eren flip, which Armin didn’t want happening in the half-full canteen of all places. 

“Don’t you want to be with your boyfriend?”

Armin hated how it sounded. It was manipulative and came out in a whiny, self-centred tone that said nothing about how concerned he was for Eren’s motives in that instant. It worked all the same though, Eren’s eyes widening once Armin’s wording hit him, and the defiant smirk he shot at Jean reminded him of the strong Eren, the one who didn’t suddenly avoid his friends or write in cursive.

It had been exactly what Eren had wanted before he went to the toilet, so he seemed quite content, smiling softly and continuing the conversation as if nothing had happened, but it was also feigned. A little shallow, a little fake, because he was still hiding so much: not even just what he had intended to do after school but in general, now Armin had expressed his concerns aloud. Eren’s problems only seemed to multiply and Armin got the feeling a good deal more than he’d care to admit was down to him.

Whatever was playing on Eren’s mind, however, seemed to ebb over the rest of the lunch period. The way he shuffled closer to Armin (but not too close, not “couple” close, the blonde noted) suggested he was looking for engagement and company, but perhaps it was all a distraction from Mikasa, who Armin decided not to pay any attention to unless she made the first move. The delicate kiss on the cheek that caught Armin completely off-guard certainly implied the latter, as Armin couldn’t help but see Eren’s gaze slide in her direction multiple times in the next minute. Armin didn’t mind. He was stupidly too caught up in his own semi-fake relationship to see things from an objective angle: he saw only one item at a time, and in that moment, this boy with problems and a notepad had taken a step out of his comfort zone to turn him an interesting shade of pink, and that was all that mattered. 

This was why Jean was important. Jean, despite his on-off romantic love for both Armin and Mikasa, semi-founded culpability for aspects of Eren’s difficulties and whatever “deal” he’d consequently made with the boy himself, was objective. It was the artist’s talent; the ability to step right back from a piece of art, and within the chaos of a work in progress identify what was working well and what was heading for disaster. 

The text Jean sent during their last period reminded Armin of his strange premonitions during lunch. It read curtly, which Armin supposed was good, since he read it under his desk, out of sight of both Eren and the teacher, an admittedly mild-mannered but altogether authoritative Herr “E” Smith, as it read on his door (teacher initials largely unknown to students usually, there were many theories circulating as to what this mysterious “E” stood for).

**Whatever happens, take Eren home. Right to the doorstep.**

Armin glanced over at Jean, then at Eren, and then at Mikasa, right at the back of the room. He both wanted to know what Jean was thinking and didn’t want to ask, so he left it, locking his phone. He was far too used to life being mundane that he was shrinking away from the responsibility of action, even though action was what Eren needed in that moment. 

It was fine, he told himself. As long as he did what Jean said, regardless of motivation; that was what counted. Indeed, it worried him what he might encounter on his route, or whether he would have to meet Grisha at the other end, but it was for Eren. 

Eren, who was being shot worried glances from Herr Smith for uncharacteristically slicing up the margin of his notebook with safety scissors. 

He made no obvious attempt to escape Jean and Armin’s grasp after class either. It wasn’t as if Armin had thought Eren would have lied about that sort of thing, and he was expecting Eren to have requested to go via another teacher’s classroom, but apparently Jean’s no-nonsense approach to Eren was less naïve. Until Jean kicked his desk, Eren stared into space, not wanting to move or looking like he had anywhere to go at all. 

Armin decided not to ask.

They hung back all the same, all three of them uncomfortable with following Mikasa at such short range when she still seemed to be isolating herself from them. Conversation was thin, thinner still when they eventually got going, until they dropped Jean at his house and after Eren had established that Armin was coming all the way to his front door with him and that there was no way he’d leave before that, it eventually fizzled out completely. They trudged in silence, not close nor far from each other, sharing nothing but a shared sense of dread and a dull fatigue from the day’s work. 

Mostly, Armin’s head swam with the tension of their current situation- it wasn’t this hard normally to communicate with Eren, anxiety and all- but his mind eventually wandered to thinking about how tired he was, and then remembering the night before. Eren had his head down, watching his feet intently as he walked, so it was impossible to tell what he was thinking about, but Armin supposed it was what punishment would be waiting for him when he stepped through the front door. Armin’s thoughts of tender intimacy and Eren’s of guilt and pain were connected by the same event, and that sickened Armin.

It was unlike him to be so bold as to snap and drag Eren into the nearest alleyway, but it wasn’t as if Eren was his usual self either.

Eren flinched, and Armin’s breath caught in his throat. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. Or rather, he knew exactly what he wanted to say, but there was so much of it and he’d learnt that some of it, sometimes, he couldn’t say. Armin’s philosophy classes may have taught him that nihilism dictates that one is suspended in the universe free of all social convention and moral obligation, but life had taught him that words could tear a person’s soul irreparably in two.

Eren looked scared. Not even just a little bit scared, as if startled by Armin’s behaviour or threatened by being held up rather steadily against a wall (though not to it, given the state of Eren’s back), but genuinely scared, as if fear saturated his entire being so much that he was exhausted of all personality and was just… scared.

Armin loosened his grip.

“I…” he began, and Eren moved his hands up slowly to where Armin had hold of his shirt, taking hold of his arm gently and in what Armin supposed he was supposed to perceive as a non-confrontational manner. It was pointless. Armin could feel Eren’s heart hammering from both his chests and the slight shaking of his fingertips, and his hands were clammy again. 

He wasn’t sure whether Eren was panicking at Armin’s company or at his impending arrival home, and he never asked. He kissed him, properly, but Eren didn’t respond as if he even felt it, merely looking down at Armin in fear, so Armin let go of his shirt. There was a pause, in which, like a long-trapped animal finally staring into the void of an open gate, Eren looked unsure of whether he was really allowed to leave. He did eventually though, saying nothing, making no inclination to Armin as to how he felt, whether he was angry or when Armin was to see him again. He was at the corner, and then he was gone, and that was it: an anti-climax, a profession of doom, unrelieved tension and a cliff-hanger all rolled into one.

Armin stood dumb for a minute, watching the space where he’d last seen Eren, his lips tingling with that last regretful sensation and his head like static on a television. He was still out of tune with reality when he fumbled for his phone in his pocket and hit the button to his last lifeline with one cold finger, lifting the receiver to his ear and waiting for his world to uncloud itself as the dialling tone screamed at him to disappear.


	18. Review Method

Jean’s voice was too clear, as if they were the only two in existence, rather than a few signals and electrical impulses in a vast network of systems converted into meaning and forced through a tiny wire mesh at the top of Armin’s mobile.

“Armin?”

“Jean,” he said, his own voice sounding as if coming from a million miles away, “I’ve fucked up.”

“What do you mean? Is Eren there?”

“…N-No. J-Jean, I’ve really fucked up, Eren’s gone and I was… I wanted to comfort him but I didn’t know whether to talk about his dad or that me and him was a genuine thing or to confront him about the letter or to ask him what he was thinking about Mikasa or whether we should plan something so that his whole life wasn’t… just… this dread. He just looked like he was dreading everything. I-I wanted him to feel better but I didn’t, I fucked up and I kissed him and I shouldn’t have-”

“Woah, Armin, slow down, I’ve never heard you swear like this so it’s sort of hard keeping up even if you’re not talking ten-to-the-dozen, which you are. Where’s Eren now?”

“I… don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” Jean’s voice suddenly filled with a level of urgency, and Armin remembered his instruction to take Eren right to the door of his house. 

“I… I… We were near his house, I guess he might have…”

“How do we know?” Jean snapped.

“I… I d-don’t know, I’m sorry,” Armin felt tears rising, together with an abject sense of dread, “I-I’m sorry, I fucked up, I’m… I’m such a terrible person,” he sniffed.

There was a pause on the line, and Armin had to listen hard to check for Jean’s breathing. There were a few moments where he sounded as if he were stuttering, somehow struggling to get his words out or decide what to say, but eventually he continued, sounding slightly more strained but all the same maintaining his usual self-confidence.

“I can’t really explain it right now, but you need to go after him, right now.”

“W-What do you mean you can’t explain it to me?” Armin asked, though he broke into a jog all the same, heading the opposite direction down the side-street in the hope of cutting off the corner to where Eren’s house was in relation to the direction whence they came. “What do you know that I don’t?”

“Are you following him?”

“I’m trying to,” Armin scowled, wiping the tears now trickling down his cheeks away somewhat furiously. “Tell me what I don’t know.”

“I don’t know anything, it’s just a strong suspicion,” Jean insisted, and Armin believed him, but it didn’t make him less annoyed. Sure, Armin himself wasn’t invested in sharing the details of his and Eren’s relationship with Jean, but he had anyway: and he guess now he was thinking about why he should justify it working in his favour, it always had something to do with Jean being someone he could rely on, someone he’d known for a long time, even if they hadn’t entirely been friends for that entire period. To him, it seemed only fair Jean share what went on between him and Eren: they seemed to hide more between them than Eren and Armin and they weren’t even the ones dating.

“Then what’s the problem? I’m not in a good place at the moment Jean, c’mon, you’re making me run after Eren but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say when or if I catch up with him,” Armin said, beginning to pant slightly of the exertion of jogging through suburban Berlin with his heavy schoolbag banging against his legs and his phone pressed up with a sweaty palm against his ear.

“It’s for your own good,” Jean preached.

“If it’s for my good, then why am I running?” Armin asked, and stopped for a moment, breathing heavily. He hadn’t said this to change Jean’s mind, he was just tired, but it worked out well for him, as Jean heard him stop and took this to be a direct challenge of his own authority of having made Armin chase Eren in the first place. 

“Fine… Think back to Eren’s change of mood and how it coincided with wanting to avoid everyone after school, including Mikasa and you and me. I think… I think Eren’s going to attempt suicide.”

Armin’s mouth went dry. 

His first port of call was denial, but Jean was too good: Jean had already anticipated this, this was why he’d been so insistent they walk home together and that had been why Eren had resisted so badly. He’d made Armin sit up and notice something suspect even before it had been hinted that Eren might be in a strange mood. And then… That rejected kiss, had that been more than Eren being preoccupied with his impending punishment? Had he been preoccupied with something else, something that not even Armin could comprehend?

“Oh my… you’re right. J-J-Jean, what have I done?” Armin asked, and suddenly, he’d split into a frantic run, taking a sharp left towards the route Eren should be taking in the hope he might meet with him before getting to the house. 

“Armin! Calm down!” Jean yelled, before adding, “This is why I didn’t want to tell you.”

“What if it’s too late? I’ve y-you’d have told me at school, I would have been surer not to let him go.”

“I thought if I told you and he did it anyway, outside of your control, you’d have found yourself culpable because you were aware of its possibility and would never stop blaming yourself!”

“You overthink this stuff far too much Jean!” Armin wailed between breaths. Jean’s side of the story would make logical sense later when he looked back on the situation, but in that moment, the abject lack of communication based purely on a theory of how Armin might react was deplorable.

“I-It’s only a theory, Armin,” came Jean’s defence.

“Don’t try and tell me for a minute that it’s just a theory, i-it’s a real threat or I wouldn’t be r-running,” Armin spat in reply, the end of the sentence ending in a slight hysterical screech thanks to his voice suddenly breaking. 

His feet pounded the ground, sending shock-waves up his body, and it became harder to hold the phone to his ear as one strap of his backpack slipped off and sat stubbornly in the fold of his arm. He wanted to stop and catch his breath- his lungs were screaming for him to do so- but there was no way he could let himself. 

And it was thus that Armin Arlert found himself on the doorstep of the Jaeger household, clutching his knees in breathlessness, his panic pertaining to the well-being of Eren and fear of the elder Jaeger colliding with each other in his already chaotic mind. He felt like a computer when none of the programmes would respond but because the clicker would still move, so no one could assume it had crashed even though there was no way it was going to work anytime soon without rebooting. 

Jean was still on the line, rather incredibly. Armin had to wait a few seconds for Jean to realise Armin had put the receiver back against his ear before he said anything.

“Armin? What… Where are you?”

“…I’m… I’m out…side,” he whispered through gulps of air. 

“W-What, outside Eren’s? Didn’t you run into him?”

“N-No, and I wish… I wish I had. Jean, what should I do? I… might get Eren in more trouble if I… But then I really… I really can’t stand out here and do nothing.” He scowled, a frisson of injustice electrifying his spine and making him jerk upright. “Why do people do this…? I mean-”

“Save it, Armin. Look, I’m on my way, but… Urgh, I don’t fucking know, I can’t make the decision for you, you’re a smart kid- smarter than me and Eren put together- so you’ve got to work out what you should do. Pick the decision you’re going to regret least. The one you can live with.”

When Jean put it like that, it was an easy choice, and both of them knew it. Brash idiot though he may be, Jean was proving himself useful more often than not these days. 

“OK, but… Stay on the line. I know you have free calls. I’ll put the phone in my chest pocket: don’t say anything though, OK?”

“Sounds like a plan. If I get there before you’re done, I’ll wait round the corner.”

Armin nodded, before feeling stupid remembering Jean couldn’t see him, so made a noncommittal noise into the phone and slotted it, as promised, into the top pocket of his jacket.

What was his excuse going to be? He couldn’t tell the truth, could he? Maybe Eren’s mother would understand, but Armin was sure it wasn’t his place to say: they didn’t even know each other’s’ names, let alone discuss a boy they had starkly contrasting links to behind his back. Plus, nothing was for sure anyway. The last thing he wanted was for Eren to know how wrong-footed he’d gotten. 

Perhaps not the whole truth, but if he were to work on honesty in the hope of not complicating things for Eren, then an apology on his own part for his irresponsibility the day before. He needed a guise to speak to Eren in private too, and schoolwork didn’t seem to cut it with his mother. It needed to be strong enough to justify him coming round right after having seen him, so something urgent they’d jointly forgotten that wasn’t schoolwork, he thought. A birthday? A school errand? A trip? 

Alas, somewhere a clock was ticking, and Armin found himself knocking the door before he’d thought of an excuse. He was in the habit of relying on strokes of genius, as a natural intellectual plagued recently with a lack of motivation or interest in everything that passed him by. He hoped this wasn’t the day it came back to bite him.

He had déjà vu. Of course, he’d stood and waited there before, but he felt he’d dreamt about this the night before when he and Eren had been clutching each other like lovers on an iceberg. Again, he was left waiting an uncomfortable amount of time before there was a scuffle on the other side of the door, his heart pounding in his throat even though he’d caught his breath already and his mind spinning with possibilities. 

The door opened, and Armin held his breath.

It was Mikasa.

“Mikasa,” he exhaled, forgetting to greet her in a normal fashion. She scowled, but Armin didn’t suppose it was in reply, more being a general reaction to seeing Armin that in disgust of his lack of formalities. 

She’d changed clothes, and was now wearing jogging bottoms and a tank top. Armin couldn’t help but admire her impressive physique, entranced by the way her muscles flexed as she moved to lean on the doorframe.

“Mikasa, I… I’m sorry. A-About last night, I really didn’t mean to make anyone worry and I know it was really foolish but… we didn’t mean to hurt you. Eren, he… He cares about you, s-so…”

“You don’t need to tell me what Eren thinks, he can speak for himself,” she muttered, and Armin was taken aback by her forwardness, semi-expecting to be ignored. He also felt himself feeling guiltier than he had before he’d apologised, as if admitting his wrongs had just served to highlight more of his own dismal failings.

“I-I know. I… I… I’m not trying to get between you and Eren, or interfere or anythi-”

“Be careful what you say,” Mikasa whispered.

“Ah,” Armin squeaked, and went silent. Mikasa looked behind her, subtle about the way her eyes roamed the dark hallway. It was a few moments before her head snapped back again and she glared at him, realising that he was going to let the conversation hang disappointingly like a limp lettuce leaf.

“You shouldn’t be here.” It wasn’t a warning, it was an order; except Armin was here for something specific, and he wasn’t leaving without it.

“Is Eren OK?”

“Why wouldn’t he be?” came the answer, but it wasn’t from Mikasa. It was the East German mother, shrouded in mystery, patriarchal darkness and the shadow of the hallway, coming to rest her hand on Mikasa’s back. “You were muttering to each other,” she smiled, “So I came to see what was so secret.” She winked at Armin, and Armin found himself once again dumbstruck by her inexplicably gentle control of the situation, reminded of his own subservient conversational skills the last time they’d met. 

“I’ve met you before,” she remarked after a second of reflection, looking him up and down. “The other day. Ah, I don’t forget a pretty face. You’re Mikasa and Eren’s friend from school?”

“Just Eren’s,” Mikasa butted before Armin could answer, though her tone lacked the malign maliciousness that it might have had had her adoptive mother not have been stood there.

That was when the woman Armin would come to know as Carla Jaeger took a step in a different direction. Little did Armin know it, but this woman, other than being the driving force behind Eren’s odd bouts of determination and Mikasa’s steeled exterior, would become one of the most important figures in shaping his life, even though he would have only met her on a few occasions. This such occasion was what, in retrospect, Armin might have described as pivotal by the way she smiled yet again and stood to one side.

“Well, don’t stand in the doorway. Mikasa, show her through and I’ll go and get Eren.”

Mikasa wasn’t given a moment to contest it. Carla made her way up the narrow stairs to the right, treading each step with precision and meaning, leaving Mikasa so taken aback by the reaction that she didn’t even find it interesting to joke to Armin as to why his friend’s mother thought he was a girl. 

She had to acquiesce, of course. Carla was not someone Armin got the feeling one would want to cross, like a more mature and skilled version of Eren in the way she would approach her anger. On the other hand, she’d gone to get Eren, rather than yelling up after him, as most parents would do. His mind wanted to call Eren spoilt, but the uncomfortable atmosphere that saturated his being when he stepped into the house reminded him he could not be more wrong. 

It looked like a relatively normal house, if not neater than most. The first room Armin saw was the lounge, where he was taken and sat down on an ugly but altogether comfortable sofa, with pillows that rather attractively didn’t sag whatsoever. The front widow was framed with olive curtains, while an old but well-cared for Persian rug pooled on the wooden floor at his feet. There was a boxy television sat on a stand in the corner next to the window, but by far the centrepiece of the room was the wood-burner enshrined by a rustic but somewhat emotionless hearth situated directly opposite from where he and Mikasa had sat themselves down. Although not on, the half-full ash collector and dirtied dustpan and brush to one side of it said it was fully functional. 

As his eyes wandered up the grain of the wood, he also found himself fixated by the photos sat along the mantle in mismatched frames, crowned in the middle by what looked like a make-shift professional family photo.

None of the faces looked instantly familiar, but his heart jumped all the same: after all, it only took basic logic to know who he was looking at. 

“You can look at it, if you want,” Mikasa told him, and Armin was surprised to find her voice not at all sharp or scathing, as if she recognised how they’d both entered unfamiliar territory. However, when he looked to her for reassurance, he found none, so out of politeness more than genuine intrigue, got up to look at the photo. 

It was clearly quite old, judging only on the ages of the Jaegers, though the quality of photography could have passed as modern-day. The background was plain white, as if a sheet had been hung up, but the strange shadows and certain lacking sharpness of professional photos suggested a home job, even though the casual but showy poses seemed to mimic the pretentiousness of studio photography. 

Eren and Mikasa couldn’t have been older than eleven. Both were staring directly at the camera with a twinkle in their eyes: which, together with wide smiles, made Armin shiver. It wasn’t that the photo was bad. The photo was incredibly genuine, and that was what made it so strange, to reflect upon the Eren and Mikasa he’d come to know so personally in such a short space of time and compare them to these grinning children who looked so painfully familiar yet also like imposters. How much could a photo be trusted, he wondered?

He’d never seen either of them smile like that, or even remotely close.

“You look so small,” Armin remarked quietly, before adding, “Mikasa,” for the sake of Jean on the phone in his pocket, who he figured would be having problems trying to keep up with who was with him. Then he indulged, “And so… soft, too.” 

“I hate that photo,” Mikasa mumbled. Armin didn’t blame her. In the photo, the two children were posed (most probably on stools) in front of their proud parents, and the way Eren’s father was clutching Eren whilst they were both grinning seemed straight out of some strange, warped alternate-universe. Grisha’s awkward 20th Century German philosopher-style glasses, unfashionably long hair and pasty complexion made him seem as if he didn’t belong with the three doe-eyed, darker-skinned people sat with him. The whole set-up was both plastic and genuine at the same time, and it scared Armin that he couldn’t come to a clear judgement on what that photo represented in context; was this a hark back to happier times, or a long-running façade… or both?

Armin was glad he hadn’t dared to pick the photo up as he almost certainly would have dropped it when there was a scuffle at the door. He turned round to see Eren stood frozen in the doorway. Armin was unsure how he could come to look to haggard so quickly- perhaps it was the lighting- but more than that, he was struck by the momentary look of horror on Eren’s face, as if he’d seen a ghost. The expression was wiped off quickly enough for Carla not to notice as she pushed him gently into the room, but Mikasa and Armin both saw it. 

Eren turned to leave, gesturing with a wiggling of his wrist that he wanted a pen, but Carla turned him around and quietly assured him he wouldn’t need one, with which he surprisingly didn’t argue, instead sitting down on the opposite sofa from where Armin had put himself back next to Mikasa.

It was when Carla shut the door to and came to sit neatly next to Eren (who also seemed to be oddly proper and upright, especially considering how he’d been comfortable lounging at Jean’s house even when sober) that Armin began to understand why Eren might have looked so terrified. He also began to worry about the phone in his pocket, and prayed Jean wouldn’t give himself away.

“It’s… um…” Armin felt he should break the silence, so clung onto what he knew he should probably say, “I’m the reason you thought Eren had gone missing last night, I’m sorry, he was at mine and we fell asleep. I’m really sorry, i-it was my fault really…”

“It’s OK,” Carla replied, and Eren stiffened, “Eren knows. It was just concerning.”

“Except he does it a lot,” Mikasa butted in, and Armin froze. He thought Mikasa had realised they three were in a precarious position and had softened her stance, and yet there she was, throwing Eren unnecessarily under the wagon. 

That look of fear was returning to Eren’s face again. It reminded Armin of why he was so on edge: it seemed too easy that Eren was there, alive, lip healing, and to have been let into the Jaeger front room without even being asked his name or purpose. Where was Eren’s dad? What had gone on already that Armin couldn’t see?

Eren couldn’t have been home that long, Armin thought, throat dry. Then again, he’d already been wrong on one count: thinking he’d easily catch up to Eren by running after him down side-streets. Maybe time was skewed in Armin’s mind.

It went uncomfortably silent then.

From an outside perspective, Armin’s opportunity to get at the heart of Eren and Mikasa’s problems were amplified by having gotten his foot in the door. He could, in theory, dismantle the systems and the lies that brought about an environment of abuse, understand more deeply the mechanisms of the family itself and talk to Eren in particular in an environment where he was, for once, familiar.

And yet, there Armin was, staring down at his own knees, quivering under the soft yet delicately dangerous gaze of Eren’s mother, and everything seemed so impossible. 

“How’s school… Ah, sorry, I didn’t catch your name…?”

“Armin,” Armin replied stiffly, wondering if she would pick up on her own mistake in regards to Armin’s presumed gender. He thought he saw her stop and reflect for a moment, but she didn’t say anything. Armin was somewhat relieved: it wasn’t as if he cared much what he was referred to as, he just didn’t want things to become any more uncomfortable.

“Armin? I’m Carla. How’s school? You were asking if Eren was OK, did something happen today?”

“N-No, I mean… I…”

“Eren was worried about getting in trouble, right?” Mikasa intervened, and Armin had to do his utmost to hide his shock at her once again about-turn of tact. He had no idea if she had an inkling of why Armin was there, but either way, she wanted his real motivations kept secret.

He was reminded of what Eren had said in his letter, about obscuring Armin from the reign of his father. Should Armin continue this, casting himself as a different character for the sake of Eren’s parents? Surely it was too late to put on an act now?

He coughed nervously. “Um, yeah, and I felt bad too since it was mostly my fault and I’m not in trouble because my mum didn’t mind,” he lied, “Eren was quiet all day.”

Carla’s eyes narrowed, and Armin realised he’d put his foot in it, whatever “it” was.

“Eren’s always quiet,” she smiled, as if it were a joke, but having her own son sat next to her looking like death warmed-up sucked any well-meaning out of it so that it became an empty, viscous statement, sitting like gloop in the room and pervading Armin’s mind.

“I-I know,” Armin laughed hollowly, “He has other means of communication, though?”

Armin hated himself. Why were they talking about Eren right in front of him? Wasn’t it degrading?

“We try, don’t we,” Carla muttered in Eren’s direction, and he nodded obediently. Armin wasn’t sure what that meant- he didn’t remember anything hostile being said about Eren’s mother, yet she’d obviously failed to protect her son and adoptive daughter from her own husband…

Wait, Armin thought. He’d read about this kind of thing before: of course, “East German” was Eren’s understanding or only available conceptualisation of the controlling environment he lived in. Armin could see it himself, through this uncomfortable atmosphere and Eren’s unreliable narration of his own situation. And of course, Carla Jaeger, the “male hunter”, the woman who seemed timid yet also as if she hid this terrible ferocity, a repressed anger waiting and waiting to bubble up but never quite doing so, stopped by some social convention or twisted moral order: Eren’s mother wasn’t failing, she was controlled.

Yet she still held some balance of power. 

Armin inhaled. She had become his target. Or rather, he hadn’t decided that yet, but it was simmering in the back of his mind and had, in all honesty, probably started with learning that Eren’s mother had has the patience to sit down with her son and help him work through his mutism. He appreciated the sentiment, if not holding back by wondering if her real goal was to save her own marriage by try to remove (with a degree of futility) what she saw as the obstacle.

“Do you want tea, Armin?” the woman in question stepped in on his train of thought, modest leather loafers crushing the track of his mind.

“Oh… Uh, yeah, thanks.”

Eren made a gesture before his mother could move and darted from the room.

“…Do you want me to go and tell him how you like it?” Carla filled in, and this time it was Armin’s turn to spring from his seat.

“It’s OK,” he said hurriedly, “I’ll help. Which… Which way is it?”

“Oh, through just on the left,” she replied wanly, and Armin had to admit, he was surprised by the lack of resistance. He’d gotten the impression Carla was an overly-domesticated woman fixated on her tasks so much that she defined herself by how well she could grow potted plants or line up perfects sets of shoes at the front door; like before Betty Friedan came along in America, he supposed. Perhaps it was down to the lack of Grisha’s presence- and indeed, where was he?

There was no movement other than Eren’s outside the living room, yet still Armin remained timid in his transition to the kitchen. He hadn’t meant to surprise Eren, but the boy had had his back to him and Armin’s clicking of the door couldn’t be heard over the low rush of the kettle heating up. Eren was somehow on high sensitivity setting, with his normal blank spots of idiocy in his spatial awareness that had been the cause of Marco never quite getting to know him properly after that one time. When Armin said his name, he dropped the spoon of coffee he was holding, and it clattered on the floor, granules making a shape like a firework on the linoleum. 

“Ah, I’m sorry,” Armin whispered, but Eren’s mood had changed. He took no notice of the spoon and coffee and stepped towards Armin, grabbing his arms stiffly and waving wildly towards the living room. 

And there it was, the Eren Armin knew, angry and gesturally verbose. What Armin hadn’t expected, however, was for him to look so terrified, eyes wide as he glanced back at the door.

When Armin couldn’t reply, he began making more gestures and signs, all too wild or complicated for Armin to decipher, which only made Armin panic more.

“E-E-Eren, I-I’m sorry… L-Look, calm down,” he whispered, “Please calm down.” He looked down and took Eren’s hand in his, dark skin against light skin, bony fingers against chubby ones, and rubbed his knuckles soothingly. For a moment Eren struggled- there was nothing that was going to stop him being on edge, that was fact- but slowly acquiesced, relaxing into the movement and staring intently down at his bare feet.

Eren bit his lip.

“I’m sorry about before, too. I mean,” he whispered, “Trying to… yeah… like that, in the alleyway. I was scared. I’m worried about you, I know what you came home to do and I know why you tried to avoid me and Jean-”

Eren suddenly caught on to what he was talking about and jerked away violently as if he’d been burnt. Guilt once again washed over Armin. Perhaps he shouldn’t have brought it up. Sure, the subject needed broaching, but perhaps not while they were pretending to make tea with Mikasa and Carla waiting patiently in the next room. One could have described Eren’s expression very basely as “offended”, but it was more than that: someone other than Mikasa had interrogated him about the last thing he wanted to talk about and it disturbed something deep inside him.

“Please, Eren,” Armin begged, holding back tears again.

And then, just like that, Eren turned his back again and started to clean up the spilt coffee granules, knees clicking as he bent to sweep them up with a handheld brush.  
“Eren, we’re going to talk about it,” he said, no longer whispering. “I’m going to find an excuse to leave now, and I’ll be waiting down the road, if you can make it.” While Eren’s back was still turned, he jabbed at his phone in his pocket, hopefully hanging up or at least sending some kind of signal to Jean about his intentions.

Sure enough, the moment Eren stood up the kitchen was filled with a shrill electronic ringing, and Armin whipped his phone out of his breast pocket in faux surprise. Eren forgot the tension of the moment before and squinted dumbly at Armin, wondering how timing could have been so impeccable, and Armin couldn’t help but feel quite nonchalant that for once everything had gone to plan as he picked up the call.

“Hello?”

“Oh, I guess this is what you wanted me to do since you don’t sound annoyed.”

“Oh,” Armin projected his voice, “I’m sorry, I’ll be right there.”

“I’m literally on the corner when you’re ready.”

“Thanks,” Armin said, and meant it. “Cya.”

He made a point of hanging up the phone, and looked up at Eren, who had forsaken tea-making in favour of holding the boiled kettle forlornly in mid-air, watching Armin carefully.

What Armin said then, as he opened the door to the hallway, was a string of loud excuses and farewells, but he made sure Eren was paying no attention to that with a hand signal out the door and to the left, and then two fingers, and then holding his palms close together to denote a small space or in this case, an alley. 

Eren was too dumbstruck for Armin to have known whether he understood or not, and he wasn’t about to wait around inside that house to find out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason I was Googling "Carla" the other day (I think I was trying to work out if "Kalura" is a real name, which it isn't) and "Carla" means "male". "Jaeger" of course means hunter, so "Carla Jaeger" is a male hunter? But why, I hear you ask? In the context of the series, a male shounen protag who not only reverts some gender norms in himself and his relationship with Mikasa, but who pines after his mother rather than his father. (Or that's my reading idk bruh)
> 
> "Eren", by the way, means "saint". Eren Jaeger is a saint that hunts (ie, kills titans). Nice huh.


End file.
